Tough Baby (Martin Fender Novel)

by Jesse Sublett

  “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.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “You got that right. No major label is gonna do any business with a guy like me who used to do business with Bingo Torres.”

  “It would look bad.”

  “Look pretty bad. Yeah, you right, it’d look pretty bad, especially now.”

  “Well, Vick, there’s no such thing as a good time to be blackmailed. But what could Retha Thomas have had to do with it?”

  “Hell, I don’t know, Martin. Maybe nothing. Maybe she was keeping an eye on me for the blackmail crew. That’s the only thing that makes sense to me. Otherwise, I got no real enemies. I’m just here on the fringe of the music community, a junk collector, an average guy, ’cept maybe a little bit fatter than everybody else. I try to help people, make sure a guy can get the right kind of clothes to wear on stage, so he doesn’t have to go to the mall and buy a bunch of trendy shit makes him look like an MTV clone. Make sure a guitar player has a decent, American guitar on stage. Tube amplifiers. Leather jackets. These goddamn records. I’m just an old fat rock and roller, Martin. I collect junk, and people come here looking for treasure, they think they found it. Who’d wanna fuck with me?”

  “I give up.”

  “Come on, Martin. You want a guitar, a bass guitar? Come

  on, what you want? I got a cherry ’63 P-bass suit you fine. Ampeg scroll top, even an old Kay upright Willie Dixon played down at Antone’s one time. Could let you have that for a C-note, you help me out. I gave Stevie Ray Vaughan that pink Strat of his. Gave the Thunderbirds all matching white dinner jackets one time. I help you, you want it. You gonna help me?”

  “Help you what?”

  “Help me handle this, you know. What can I do? I can’t stand this kinda stress. I talked to my doctor yesterday, he said, ‘Vick, you weigh three hundred and twenty pounds. You either gonna have a heart attack or blow up. My nurse has twenty bucks says you gonna blow up.’ How do you like that? My goddamn doctor is laying odds I’m gonna have a heart attack.”

  “What about the nurse?”

  “Fuck the nurse. I know I’m not gonna blow up. But I can’t stand this stress. I can’t make the payoff, meet some scary-ass guys on a country road in the middle of the night. I don’t want my doctor to get that twenty bucks. I don’t. Whaddya say?”

  “Go on a diet. Try oat bran.”

  “Come on, man.”

  “It’s not my problem. I don’t need the stress any more than you do. I just got off the road and I’m trying to reassemble my love life. Getting involved with this isn’t going to help that any. But mostly, I don’t trust you.”

  I got up to leave. He looked disappointed. Sweat poured off his forehead and plastered one of the curly strands of hair to an area just to the side of his right eye, suggesting a deep gash in his head. He made a fist and ground it into the table.

  “I wish I had some money to offer you, Martin. I don’t have more’n fifty bucks petty cash. Business been slow. I could give you a thousand bucks after I get the record money, should be some time next week. Whaddya say?”

  “We’ve all got problems. I don’t need yours.”

  “All right, fine, Martin,” he drawled, a big pout on his face. He stubbed out his cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke over me as I got up. “You’re no more’n a little fixture in this town, you know, and you ain’t gonna get no bigger.”

  “You’ve got better things to do than try to hurt me.”

  “I don’t fucking need to, man. You’re just a goddamn bass player, rehashing the same shit every night with a bunch of white boys trying to do something black people do a hell of a lot better.” He grinned. “Ain’t the only thing they do better, what I hear.”

  I felt my neck stiffen as his grin widened.

  “Say, how was that black pussy, anyway?”

  His head rocked back like a bowling pin when I slugged him.F

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The next morning I went back to work at the collection agency. I didn’t want to, but we’d been stiffed by the last couple of clubs on the tour and the money from Sunday night’s gig had to go toward road debts. I had thirty-nine dollars in my wallet and a lot of dirty laundry. Welcome home. There was the An- tone’s gig this weekend and I had some money in the bank, plus I was expecting a royalty check from a song I’d co-written that was going to be a B-side of a single coming out on CBS in a couple of months. But a little running around cash would help, and with the resources at the collection agency I might be able to find out a little more about Retha Thomas and also Vick Travis, if I was so inclined.

  Lone Star Detectives and Collection Agency had moved into a little rectangular building that used to be a Mexican restaurant just down South 1st from my apartment. The detectives operated out of a small building just in back that was formerly a tortilla factory. The two buildings were now connected by a narrow corridor that doubled as a break room. I could smell the coffee burning in the bottom of the urn as I sat at the desk in my cubbyhole, trying to readjust. It was hard.

  I’d ridden, driven, and slept beside over eighteen weeks of highway, seen cars go off mountaintops, marriages break up, club owners go into DTs, flattened rodents broiling on the blacktop. There had been two or three governments overthrown, four US diplomats kidnapped or shot or both, a half dozen Texas savings and loans gone under, a number of wildlife species declared irrevocably extinct. But the office was the same. There was still an office fat girl pushing doughnuts and brownies to everyone who passed her desk, a bosomy redheaded divorcee who regularly teased me about accompanying her on one of her bimonthly Vegas junkets, a trailer house redneck who went to church every Sunday and K-Mart every Saturday, a couple of yuppie-wannabes who worshipped the Beatles, subscribed to Architectural Digest, and yearned for Volvos.

  “It’s good to have you back,” said Jack Green, the office supervisor. “I guess you know what to do.”

  “Sure.”

  “We got a new computer system. You notice?”

  I shook my head. He did a poor job of hiding his disappointment. Just like the time I hadn’t jumped up and down over his decision to name his first-born son Dylan. “What can we expect from you, Martin? About twenty hours a week?”

  “I think I can manage that. I’ve got a few things still up in the air since I got back, but ...”

  “We’ve got an office softball game and picnic on Sunday. We’ve been doing it every other week. Like to see you there.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t have to bring a glove, we’ve got plenty. But bring a covered dish, or, well, you probably don’t cook, do you? How about some Doritos?”

  “I promise not to come without any.”

  He nodded, adjusting a paisley tie on a cheap dress shirt. “How was the tour? Did you rock out, Martin? Lots of groupies following you around?”

  “You know how it is,” I drawled through a conspiratorial one-sided grin. You can’t let people like that down.

  He chuckled, squeezing his eyes shut, playing a wild lick on an air guitar, saying, “Yeah, man. You gotta take me along next time. I’ll be your road manager, OK?”

  “No problem.”

  He left me alone. I looked down at the stacks of files and envel
opes marked “return to sender” and the late notices and all the sneaky city directories and microfiches full of names and addresses that were supposed to help me find people so the collection agents could call them and badger them into paying their bills. I felt like the new animal in the zoo and all the junk on my desk was some kind of new zoo food that the keepers were waiting for me to eat and say, Yeah, tastes great, just like the stuff in the jungle. It was going to be rougher than I thought.

  &&

  I did some legitimate work, sorting out accounts, calling up some landlords and getting the names of relatives of tenants who’d skipped out. Because if they skipped out on their cable TV bills or their telephone bills, which we handled, there was a good possibility that they’d also done something to make their landlord want to fink on them. But I also fired up the computer that was hooked into the central computer at the retail merchants’ credit bureau and pulled a credit file on Victor Angelo Travis. Just as I’d thought, he was pretty much of a cash operator, but he had taken out a small bank loan back in 1985. I called the bank. He’d put up his store for collateral, and at that time the store was worth a net of about $15,000. Then I entered the name of Retha Ann Thomas and the city of Los Angeles. A file came up. It listed her as unemployed, with Tower Records being her last employer. There were a few department store accounts, American Express, and the name of her bank. There was something a little disturbing about the waxy computer paper with the squiggly computer fonts, coldly revealing what it knew about her. I tore the printout off the printer, folded it, and slipped it in my jacket.

  I looked around. I was probably the only guy in the room who knew the real words to “Louie, Louie.” It was 3:30, time for an afternoon break. Most of the other employees headed for the break room for some microwave popcorn, burnt coffee, or a diet drink. I went over to the front door, where Detective Sergeant Jim Lasko of the Austin police department’s homicide division stood resetting his beeper.

  “Howdy,” I said.

  “Howdy doo,” he said. “You’re under arrest.”

  &&&

  “Man you have no sense of humor whatsoever,” drawled Lasko as we rode toward downtown in his pickup truck. “None what-all.”

  “Put yourself in my shoes, why don’t you.”

  With the thermometer registering somewhere between the high seventies and mid-eighties it was temperate for a May afternoon, the kind of weather that was pretty livable as long as you were under some shade. The windows were rolled down and the humid air and traffic sounds rushed through the cab, making our voices sound thin and raspy.

  “I mean, I could arrest you if you didn’t want to come down, but I don’t have to. Do I?”

  “Must be nice to have so many options. So what’s the big deal if I skin my knuckles on Vick Travis’s teeth?”

  “Some people like to be punched out, some people don’t. Some people don’t so bad they swear out a complaint against you. They do that, we’re supposed to respond.”

  “I thought that was for the robbery and assault division. Last I heard, you’re in homicide.”

  “That I am, Martin, that I am,” he drawled. He pulled his sunglasses down on his nose so I could see his eyes.

  “All right, then, what’s it all about?”

  “I told you that the stuff we got from the lab didn’t completely clear you any more than the circumstantial evidence we had would indict you. Didn’t I?” I acknowledged that, yes, he had told me that. “So you just kind of went from one state of suspension to another. The thing is, you’re still pretty high on our list of people to touch base with on the Retha Thomas thing.

  Now we got some more chitchat to do. You know Donald Rollins?”

  “He used to tend bar over at Steamboat, didn’t he?”

  Lasko nodded. “Made a damn good margarita.”

  “He’s a hype, right?”

  “Yep. They had to let him go when they found out he’d made a spare key for the Space Invaders machine and all the quarters were going in his arm.”

  “I seem to recall something about that. He borrowed one of Leo’s guitars. It turned up in a pawn shop in Houston and Leo had to pay a hundred bucks to get it back since he didn’t have any proof of ownership.”

  Lasko made a clucking sound. “Well, that’s too bad. They found Donald tangled up in the duckweed over close to Marshall Ford Dam this morning.”

  “OD?”

  He shrugged. “Hard to tell right off. A day or two in that lake water kinda complicates things. One thing we can tell, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He’d been beaten. Lacerations like what comes from being flogged with a whip or a belt. Handcuff marks.”

  “Weird.”

  “Yeah. It’s a weird world, Martin. Know anything?”

  “Why would I?”

  “His sister claims that he was going down to pay Vick a little visit, last she saw him. That was Sunday, but somebody else claims they saw him down there Monday night, too. Way the time works out, it looks like it was about an hour before closing time, maybe not long before you dropped in on the place.”

  I thought about that for a second. “He drive a green Plymouth?”

  “Yep. It was parked over by the dam.”

  “He left when I got there. I didn’t even see him.”

  “Too busy assaulting Vick?”

  “Aw come on, Lasko. That’s my business. Maybe it was a mistake, but—”

  “Damn right it was a mistake, Martin. What the hell were you trying to do, beat a confession out of him? I’m the law around here. You get a bug up your ass next time, come to me. It’s my job to solve crime, it’s yours to entertain people. Some day you fly off the handle like that you’ll find that you’ve blown any chance you had of making it. The music scene needs you. APD don’t.”

  “Oh, yeah. You’re doing just fine.”

  “Yeah? Well which one of us is doing better? I don’t see you on MTV. This is complicated and fucked up enough without having to deal with your bullshit. You punching out Vick is just the kind of thing that keeps you in the lineup. The Lieutenant . . . Well, forget it. You want a ride back?”

  “What? Is that it?”

  “Yeah, I guess so, for now. I told Vick, why didn’t he just cool off for a bit before he makes a final decision on pressing charges. I suggest you go over and apologize to the big porker. But don’t call him that.”

  “I won’t,” I said. “No use slandering the pigs of the world. When can I get my bass back?”

  “Might be a long time,” he said. “Retha Thomas hasn’t gotten any better.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I went back to my apartment, fed the cat, and flopped on the bed so I could think about the situation. But I hadn’t slept worth a damn in several days and ended up dozing off.

  I woke up drenched in the proverbial sweat. The whole bed was wet. But it wasn’t sweat. It was blood. The bed was stabbed with so many knives it looked like a pincushion, a graveyard for knifemen. Damn, what happened, I thought. I scratched my eyes out and threw them against the wall. Why wasn’t I buried, too? Wasn’t I sharp enough? Just because I had one little blackout. From far away, a church bell rang. But it sounded tinny. Even the Christians were cutting back.

  The phone was ringing.

  I shot off the bed like a man shot from a gun. It was Billy. He wanted to know, was I coming to rehearsal or not?

  &&&

  We had the lease on an old warehouse behind a pool hall owned by Willie Nelson on South Congress. It was about as ugly as things like that can be—corrugated tin on the outside, concrete floor and walls that had been sprayed with acoustic damping material that looked like petrified vomit inside. Leo stumbled in an hour late, smelling like a bar rag, and Ray never showed up at all. Nick and Steve had another gig to work, but they

  rarely worked rehearsals anyway. At least I’d remembered to bring the Danelectro bass.

  We ran over a few songs we hadn’t played in a while. “Nutbush City L
imits,”

  “Born Under a Bad Sign,” and “Chain of Fools." We took a break. Leo cracked open another six-pack and lit a cigarette he’d bummed from me. He didn’t understand why I should have a pack if I wasn’t going to smoke them.

  “You about out from under this thing yet, Martin?” asked Billy.

  “In a way,” I said.

  “I was just wondering, you know, for your sake,” he said. “Anything I can do?”

  “No, don’t worry about it.”

  “Because people are starting to talk,” he said.

  Leo looked up. He was holding the cigarette in the hand in the cast, cradling that hand with the other. It almost looked like he was petting a smoking rabbit. “Only six weeks of this thing, guys,” he said. “It’s like playing guitar with a goddamn boulder on the end of my arm.”

  I sighed. Billy sighed. “What are we doing here?” he said. “Haven’t we seen enough of each other?”

  “I thought we decided to get together and work up some new songs,” said Leo.

  “Yeah. Whose idea was that?” said Billy.

  “Ray’s,” I said.

  We observed a moment of silent annoyance dedicated to the saxophonist.

  “He sure seemed pissed at you yesterday, Leo,” I said. “You know why?”

  He shrugged, a dumb, innocent look on his face.

  “Leo,” I said, “why don’t we go for a walk?”

  He curled his lip at me. “Walk?”

  “You know, you stand up, move your feet. . .”

  “Something wrong with your car?”

  “No,” I said. “We could get some fresh air and talk.”