Baby, Would I Lie?

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Oh, Jack,” Binx said, also leveling with his old palsy-walsy, if that’s what we’re doing now, leveling now, “no, I won’t, Jack. No. I won’t.”

  14

  The song that got to Jack Ingersoll, perched on the Elvis seat for the 8:00 P.M. show in the Ray Jones Country Theater, was called “New York Sure Is a Great Big City,” and it went something like this:

  New York sure is a great big city,

  Blow it up, blow it up;

  Los Angeles is kinda pretty,

  Blow it up, blow it up.

  Oh, I don’t go to Washington, D.C.,

  Those marble halls are not the place for me;

  They tell me San Francisco’s kinda gay,

  I’m telling you that I will stay away.

  Chicago is a toddlin town,

  Knock it down, knock it down;

  And Boston has got great renown,

  Knock it down, knock it down.

  Oh, the country is the only place to be,

  A silo’s the tallest thing I want to see;

  I’m a country boy, my heart is in the land,

  I’m a country boy, I think this country’s grand.

  “I kind of took it personally,” Jack told Sara afterward as they ate a late dinner—late for Branson—in the Copper Penny, one of the few joints in town that served stuff recognizable as food. Only a few local hipsters and musicians were scattered around the dimly lit place, so they had their corner booth and its neighborhood completely to themselves.

  “It’s that solidarity thing again, you see?” said Sara. “They set up a tribe; they define who’s in and who’s out.”

  “I’m out,” Jack said.

  “Sure you are. So am I. And they know it.”

  Slicing steak, Jack said, “Sara, so what? Where’s the news in all this? Where’s our news in all this?”

  “Ray Jones,” Sara said, “and his audience.”

  Jack glumly chewed, hating to have to be a teacher again, knowing it brought out the worst and the snottiest in him. Swallowing, knocking back a bit of the not-bad red wine, he said, “Sara, do you really think there’s a point to be made that the great unwashed are bad judges of character, that they’ve got a shitty record when it comes to picking their heroes? Elvis was a drugged-out porker with more sexual hang-ups than a nine hundred number. The televangelists are too despicable to describe, J. Edgar Hoover was a fag-bashing faggot, and Ronald Reagan was brain-dead—they operated him from a Japanese microchip implanted after the fake assassination attempt.” Then he perked up, hearing his own words. “Say, that isn’t bad,” he admitted, and reached for pen and notepad.

  Sara grinned at him. “I see. You can take the boy out of the Galaxy, but you can’t take the Galaxy out of the boy.” She watched him jot notes. “The microchip?”

  “You bet.”

  “That isn’t for Trend, Jack; that’s even less for Trend than Ray Jones’s fan club.”

  “Not for Trend,” Jack agreed, putting pen and paper away. “For later, after Trend fires me.”

  Sara stared at him. “They’re going to fire you?”

  “Of course. They fire everybody, sooner or later.”

  “No, Jack,” she said, “not your usual cynicism. Have you heard something, that you’re gonna be fired?”

  “I don’t have to hear anything,” Jack said. “What most people don’t understand is, all jobs are temporary. You get fired, or the company folds, or the technology changes, or the customers move away, or there’s an earthquake and they don’t rebuild.”

  “So people who unpack are stupid, is that it?”

  “I don’t say that,” Jack objected. “I don’t even believe it. But I do believe I have the jump on them.”

  Sara shook her head. She hadn’t finished her food, but she clearly wasn’t eating any more. She sipped wine, sighed, frowned, and said, “Okay, I can see what’s wrong with you, but what’s wrong with me?”

  “Nothing,” he said, wanting to make nice. After all, they had to share a bed tonight.

  But she wouldn’t accept it. “There must be something,” she said, “or I’d find some normal guy, some regular member of my tribe to hang out with. But here I am with the Cheshire cat. Why?”

  “You want an answer?”

  “Yes, please.”

  She seemed serious, so he was, too. Reaching across the table, taking the fork out of her hand and putting it on her plate, then taking her hand in his, he said, “Then I’ll tell you. I’m sorry, but the diagnosis is not good. After a close look at the X rays and the test results, I’m afraid I have to tell you the reason you’re staying with me is because you love me. Sorry.”

  “Hell,” she said, squeezing his hand in hers. “I was afraid it might be something like that.”

  15

  Ray approved of Cal’s choice; the Trend girl was going to be exactly right.

  The whole bunch of them were headed over to Forsyth together in the bus, Ray and his assistant Honey Franzen and his musical director Lennie Elmore and the musicians and Ray’s manager Chuck Wagner and his regular lawyer Jolie Grubbe, who couldn’t understand why he wanted a reporter aboard. “I need a sympathetic press,” Ray explained as they were boarding the bus in front of his house out at Porte Regal, the bus already half full of his people, none of them—happily—seeming to be drunk yet, at seven-thirty in the morning.

  Jolie Grubbe, a tough lawyer of forty-something, a great big fat woman with no softness to her at all, said, “Sympathetic press? Are you crazy?”

  “Probably. Get aboard the bus, Jolie.”

  “There’s no such thing as a sympathetic press, Ray, you know that.”

  “Bus.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  That big thick body heaved itself up the steps into the bus, Ray following. Jolie thudded into the front window seat on the right and Ray sat beside her. Across the aisle, according to his prearranged plan, Lennie Elmore occupied the window seat behind the driver, with Honey Franzen next to him. The rest of the guys were distributed in the seats behind him, taking up two-thirds of the bus’s interior, with the rear third holding a john and a galley kitchen. (This, when they toured, was the band’s bus. Ray would be in the other bus, with the bedroom and the shower and the other kitchen and the closets for costumes: his dressing room on wheels.)

  Settled in her seat, recovered from the effort of climbing up into the bus, Jolie took up the theme again: “Trend isn’t gonna give you sympathetic press, Ray,” she said. “Trend is a lot of smartass New Yorkers; they blow their noses on shitkickers like you.”

  “I have my reasons, Jolie,” Ray told her in the deadpan tone of voice that meant it was time to change the subject. He eyeballed her. “Okay?”

  “Whatever you say,” Jolie said, miffed. As though he gave a shit.

  Now they were all aboard except the girl reporter. The big silver bus with RAY JONES ON THE ROAD in bright red letters on its sides rolled slowly along the winding roads from Ray’s house through the golf course and the condos and the spread-out ranch-style houses to the main gate of Porte Regal and through, then pulled in at the parking lot of Jjeepers!, the family restaurant just beyond the guard shack, where Cal had arranged that the girl reporter—Ray couldn’t seem to remember her name—would meet them.

  And there she was, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, coming out of the air-conditioned restaurant with her big brown leather shoulder bag bouncing on her hip the instant the heavy bus, elephantine and graceful, eased on down into the parking lot. A good-looking woman, Ray noted, if you wanted somebody who could take dictation, but she didn’t look as though she’d take dictation, if you follow. Ray watched her cross the blacktop toward the bus, saw the intelligence and the eagerness and the professionalism and the big-city veneer, and knew she was going to be perfect.

  Cal came down the aisle, like he was supposed to, and was there when the driver opened the bus door for the girl reporter to climb aboard. “Hi, Cal,” she said, springing lithely up the steps. “Thanks
again.”

  “Oh, sure,” Cal said, and gestured at Ray, saying, “This here’s Ray Jones. Ray, this’s Sara Joslyn, from that New York magazine.”

  “H’are ya,” Ray said, and stuck his hand out, and hers was cool and dry and bony. They exchanged strong grips and she said, “I appreciate this, Mr. Jones. I know this is a tough time for you.”

  “Our seats are back here,” Cal said, taking her arm, nipping that interview in the bud, and away they went.

  That was the point, or part of it. Whatsername—Sara?—was to be permitted to hang around but not to get chummy. Not real access, not to the extent she would ever get the idea she was being set up, since in fact she was being set up. So, for today, she had just this minute been as close to Ray Jones as she was going to get.

  The bus coughed and groaned and got itself rolling again, turning left onto 165 south, heading down toward Table Rock Dam to avoid all that traffic mess back up in Branson. Jolie wanted to spend their bus time talking about her latest dealings with Leon “The Prick” Caccatorro, the IRS guy; she was the one negotiating with the son of a bitch. The negotiations were necessary because, as it turned out, Ray had taken some wrong advice here and there, and he’d tuned out once or twice when he really should have been listening, and the way it wound up, all of a sudden he owed the feds so many millions of dollars, they could probably afford another senator or two if they got it all out of him.

  Which, naturally, wasn’t going to happen, mostly because he didn’t have that kind of money. Maybe it had passed through his fingers at one time or another, but it was gone. So what was happening now was, like any other mob operation, the government was making itself Ray Jones’s partner. From now on, any dollar he earned, some of it would to go to his agent and some to his manager and some to his lawyer and some to his ex-wife and some would go to the IRS. What was being negotiated now was just what percentage of his income was going to be the feds’ blood money and how long this unwelcome partnership was going to last.

  There was a certain amount of pressure on Ray to get these negotiations done and over with, because until they were behind him, he didn’t know what he could afford or even whether or not it would be worthwhile to go on working. But there was also a certain amount of pressure on the IRS, which helped to even things out. The pressure on the IRS was caused by the well-known uncertainties of both life and fame. If Ray Jones were to die, or if the fans were to turn against him (it had happened to others), the government just might find itself reaching for a slice of pie in an empty pie tin; better for them to make their deal while he was still riding relatively high, make their projections from this year’s earnings, not knowing what next year’s earnings might be.

  And now, as if all of that weren’t complicated enough, they had this damn murder trial to put up with. For all the IRS knew, they were negotiating with a guy who’d be sniffing the state’s cyanide a year from now, which made Leon “The Prick” Caccatorro quite visibly nervous. Good.

  The negotiations were stalled right now, mostly because of the murder trial, but that didn’t keep Jolie from going over every nuance of every word said by every participant at every meeting. Ray himself was staying out of those meetings, so he supposed he should be grateful to Jolie for taking the heat and just giving him the bits and pieces of the thing later, but Jesus! No matter how vitally important this IRS case might be in his life, in truth it was goddamn boring to listen to, and whenever Ray got bored, he eventually got irritated as well, no matter how hard he tried to be good and mature and adult.

  This time, he lasted about fifteen minutes, to and through Hollister, the village across Lake Taneycomo from Branson. “Enough, Jolie,” he suddenly said, rising from his seat, stepping forward into the well next to the bus driver, grabbing the microphone from the built-in sound system under the big windshield. Out front, a Ride the Ducks amphibian vehicle full of tourists rolled along amid the campers and station wagons like something in a Road Runner cartoon. Ray gave it a look, waved back at the kids in the rear row of the open-topped amphibian, then turned to face the bus interior, thumbed on the mike, and said, “Everybody awake?”

  Moans and groans.

  “Good,” Ray said. “Let’s rehearse the new one.”

  More moans and groans. Ray leaned back, half-seated on the shelf under the windshield, while the troops unlimbered their instruments. He could see the girl reporter back there next to Cal—damn! lost her name again—all wide-eyed and eager. Sure, let’s give her something to write home about.

  Speaking into the mike, Ray called to the new reed man, Jerry, the guy who was taking Bob Golker’s place: “Jerry, you know the IRS song?”

  “I been studying it,” Jerry called back. He was a skinny roundheaded guy with glasses, very cerebral; not as much fun as the drunken Bob Golker, but a better musician.

  In the front row, next to Honey Franzen, Lennie Elmore leaned over to say, “He’s got it, Ray; he’s a quick study.”

  “Okay.” Ray grinned at his people, in his world. “For the benefit of the reporter among us,” he said, wishing he could remember the damn woman’s name, “let me explain the background on this song. I’ve been having a little income-tax trouble lately—”

  Jolie snorted.

  “—and we’re still talking it over with the government people. Now, sometimes I get my songs out of my own life, and this is one of them. We’re not gonna do this song in public until we’ve cut our deal with the feds, so, little lady, you’re getting a preview here.”

  She didn’t like “little lady,” he could see that. Well hell, maybe he was gonna have to write her name down somewhere. Meantime, screw her. “All set, boys?” he asked.

  They were all set. This had to be an acoustic version, of course, with no bass and the drummer doing his part on the practice pad on his lap, but they could still all work at familiarizing themselves with the idea of the arrangement. Ray gave the beat, they did the intro, and in he came, sailing on top of the music, belting it to the bus as though the bus were Yankee Stadium:

  I’m singin for the IRS.

  I got myself in a real mess.

  It’s all my own fault, I guess;

  Now I’m singing for the IRS.

  I’m workin out here for the feds.

  If I don’t, I’ll be tatters and shreds;

  They own these great-lookin threads.

  I’m bein dressed for you by the feds.

  If you think your money’s yours, take my advice.

  Before you spend a dime, sit down, think twice.

  The revenooer’s auditors, they ain’t so nice;

  Where we folks got a heart, they got a piece of ice.

  I’m workin for the government man.

  I’m doin the best that I can,

  Goin along with his plan,

  Workin for the government man.

  They went through the song three times, the second time trying an idea of Lennie’s, in which the girls came in and sang counterpoint against him in the bridge, going:

  He’s singin in the rain.

  Won’t you let him explain?

  He’s lost all his money, so

  He’s broke again.

  But Ray didn’t like it. It didn’t do anything for him, or the song, or the emotion, or the relationship with the audience. So the third time, they did it without the girls, and that was better. Then Ray borrowed Peewee’s guitar and walked down the aisle to the girl reporter and said, “You don’t want to hear the same damn song over and over.”

  “I’m enjoying it,” she said, grinning at him. “I can see why you won’t take it public until after you make your deal.”

  He laughed, having a good time with her. “This one’s also autobiographical,” he lied, and strummed the guitar and went into it:

  It’s time to write another love song;

  This time, the song’s for you.

  It’s hard to write another love song,

  Unless that song is true.

  The heart that goe
s into a love song,

  That heart just must be real.

  The words that go into that love song

  Must tell you how I feel.

  I’ve written songs about most everything.

  I’ve written happy songs and blue;

  I’ve written songs I want the world to sing,

  But none of them were you.

  It’s time to write another love song,

  An easy thing to do.

  Every word I say will be my love song,

  Because the song is you.

  Finishing, he grinned at her, and she said, “Do you remember her name?”

  “Ouch,” he said. “You got me, damn it. Tell me, and I’ll never forget it again.”

  “Sara.”

  “With or without the H?”

  “Without.”

  “Lean and mean, huh, Sara?” With another good ole boy grin, Ray tapped his forehead. “I got you now,” he said, “right here in the old computer.”

  “I like the IRS song,” Sara Whatsit said. “And I liked the fried-food song, too.”

  “Maybe we’ll share some fried food together sometime,” Ray said, and bent to look past her out the window at the beginnings of Forsyth. “Looks like we’re here,” he announced. “Catch you later.”

  “You, too.”

  Feeling he’d done well enough for day one, Ray went back to his seat, returning Peewee’s guitar along the way, and looked out the big windshield at the mob clustered around the courthouse, dead ahead. TV camera crews, cops, tourists, reporters, all kinds of people. He said, “I never knew old Belle had so many friends.”

  “You give them what they want,” Jolie said, “they’ll come out for it.”

  “I guess.”

  By prearrangement, a space had been held open for the bus, where Ray would have the shortest and quickest route across the clear space to the building. A brown-uniformed trooper waved them into this slot, with so many hand gestures and body movements, you’d think they were landing a 747. The bus bunked the curb at last, stopped, and the driver opened the door, letting in the roar of the crowd.