Tough Baby (Martin Fender Novel)

by Jesse Sublett

  “Hey, Carson, why don’t you use the Visa card you used for Retha Thomas’s room at La Quinta? Or is it maxed out?”

  The waitress had arrived and was reaching for the American Express card. Carson snatched it back and said, “Would you like something? A beer maybe?”

  &&&

  The motel manager had been quite helpful. I chalked up part of my success in the matter to my experience at the collection agency. People often think they can get away with anything. They get a great idea, they make plans, they forget about the paper trail. Retha Thomas’s motel room was paid for by Carson Block’s Visa card, as was her rental car. One day last week, she’d had a visitor. This visitor had ordered drinks and paid for them with a MasterCard. The MasterCard was in the name of one B. Q. Torres. Either that night or soon after, she’d had a visitor whose description fit Barbra Quiero to a T. I was anxious to talk to the incommunicado Detective Watson about these facts. But first, I had a few bones to pick with Carson Block.

  “I don’t know this other girl you’re talking about,” Carson said, sipping his beer, swallowing with difficulty. “And I don’t know how this could be related to what happened to Retha Thomas.”

  “Retha wanted a job. You liked her but you didn’t have a position for her. You led her on. You asked her how she’d like

  an expenses-paid trip to a rocking little burg on the Colorado River. All she had to do was find out just how deeply Vick Travis was connected to Bingo Torres. Am I right so far?”

  “Look, Martin, I brought this deal to the company, so my butt was in a sling. The deal had gone too far to pull out when I heard about Vick being possibly tainted with this payola thing. I don’t have to tell you . . .”

  “You’d lose your job,” I said. “But you didn’t want to lose the deal either. That’s why you showed a little initiative.”

  He nodded, chewing one side of his lower lip.

  “What did she find out?” I asked.

  He palmed the beer glass with his hands, speaking quietly. “She had the whole picture Wednesday of last week when she called me. It didn’t sound like much of a downside. Bingo paid for a few recording sessions for Vick’s artists, using the name he used to perform under, Danny Cortez. So what? We’re talking small change stuff here, Martin, and the way I understand it, other than these deals, Vick hasn’t been closely tied with Bingo for a long time, not since the ’60s.”

  “When was the last time you saw Retha Thomas?”

  “In a bar in Hollywood, about three weeks ago. I asked her if she was interested in playing detective for me, and she was. You know the rest.”

  “Do I?”

  He chewed his lip, somewhat forcefully this time, and his eyes widened. I nearly laughed. “If you think I’d try to kill somebody just to cover my tracks on a puny little record deal. . .”

  “So puny that you hire an amateur private detective? So puny that you fly here in person to deliver a check for a hundred thousand dollars?”

  He rolled his eyes and waved for the check again. I 'settled back in my seat and thought about how much I disliked him. He cleared his throat and adjusted his shoulders under the flimsy jacket.

  “Look, I know it seems awfully sleazy. This job, you know, it isn’t always easy, and it isn’t all fun and nice to look at from the inside, either. But believe me, I’m a fan. That’s why I do it. I’m not in this to hang around with a bunch of suits. Accountants, lawyers, con artists, even amateur detectives. Sometimes you have to wade through a lot of sleazy bullshit or nobody would ever hear the music. And that’d be a shame.”

  “Speaking of lawyers,” I said, “might the friendly legal staff at IMF Records come to Bingo’s rescue, if it would be to everybody’s benefit?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  I was glad he didn’t say yes, and didn’t say no. It would have been out of character.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I got a handful of quarters at the front desk and took them to the pay phone to try out an idea I had. I checked my watch. It was eleven. That made it nine on the West Coast. I got Retha Thomas’s credit record printout from my jacket and called her bank in LA. I told the girl in the accounts department that I was calling from Lone Star Detectives and Collection Agency and that it was kind of important.

  I gave her Retha Thomas’s account number and she looked it up. Was there any unusual activity? I asked. She hummed while she looked it over. Her humming did nothing to soothe the questions that buzzed in my brain. Retha was done with her fact-finding mission Wednesday of last week, half a week before I got back to town. Why did she stick around? Was someone else paying her, too?

  “No, not really,” said the clerk. “In fact, the only activity over the last three weeks are these two deposits, both last week. One Friday, for eight hundred dollars, and then Wednesday, for five hundred.”

  “How were they made?” I asked.

  “They were deposited in an automatic teller machine in Austin,” she said. “How’s the weather down there? Hot, I’ll bet.”

  “You can fry an egg on the sidewalk,” I said. It was a lie. It never gets that hot anywhere where they have sidewalks. And besides, I was feeling a distinct chill.

  &&&

  “How’d you find me?” she asked. She was just out of the shower, in a white terry-cloth bathrobe. Tendrils of damp, just- toweled-off hair stuck up more than ever on top, and a few curved in toward her face like long thorns. We were on the fourth floor of the Radisson, a downtown glass pyramid that was a sort of skeletal ice palace version of the Hyatt’s traditional atrium design.

  “It just took a few quarters, Barbra,” I said.

  “Glad to see you finally made it out of bed.” She sat down by the window, cracked the curtain, peeked out, then let it fall shut.

  “I got your message.”

  “Did you? You don’t care. I can see you don’t really give a damn about finding out what happened to Retha. You spend all day in bed with that bimbo and the rest of the time you probably hang around with that tubby pervert and his Igor.”

  I took a step back. “That girl is not a bimbo, and I’m getting a little bit weary of this confrontational relationship of ours. I still get the distinct impression that you’d like to hold me responsible for what happened to Retha.”

  She gulped hard and looked away. Being wet and without makeup took away some of her hard edges. She had a sort of raw, benignly foreign look to her, as opposed to the hard, exotic impression she gave off fully coiffed and polished. In fact, she reminded me a little of some of the lighter-skinned Mayan women I’d seen the last time I’d been in Mexico. I felt an urge to ask where her family was from, and I wondered what she looked like when she was a little girl, where she went to school. But I swallowed those curiosities, chalking them up to the weird chemistry of our personalities, the close quarters, and her being in a damp bathrobe.

  “Look,” I said. “Retha was here on behalf of IMF Records to check out Vick Travis’s ties to Bingo Torres, a South Texas record promoter who’s hip deep in a payola scandal that would have queered the record deal that went down with IMF yesterday. I found out that Retha wired thirteen hundred dollars cash to her bank account back home. That means something, although I’m not sure what.”

  Her eyes flashed as she looked up at me, irritated. “She doesn’t know a soul in town yet she’s able to wire thirteen hundred dollars cash home and you say you don’t know what it means? It means someone here was giving her money, chicken dick. That fat son of a bitch that you’ve been working for is probably the guy. She probably decided to use what she had on him, he got tired of paying her off and had her killed. Maybe you were in on it.”

  “Maybe you were in on it,” I snapped. “Is that why you were here last week?”

  She drew the folds of the robe in closer and shook her head. “Oh God, no, Martin. She was my friend, for chrissake. She called me last week and she sounded funny. I knew she was up to something and she didn’t know what she was doing. I got in on Thur
sday, but I didn’t catch up with her until it was too late, and that’s the truth. I went by her room at La Quinta, but she wasn’t in, and that’s as close as I got until the hospital.”

  “All right. Maybe she cut a little deal of her own with Vick to keep quiet about the payola thing. That’d be a shame, because a couple of guys got a lot more for it than she did.”

  “And you don’t know who the couple of guys are, do you?” I shook my head.

  “And the police don’t know anything about this angle, do they?”

  “No, not yet.” I suddenly felt stupid, inadequate. Between the drawn curtains and the wet girl, the room felt claustrophobic. I wanted to get out of there, but not until I had resolved to do something right for a change. As weary as I was of Barbra’s chronic suspicion and mercurial outbursts, I didn’t want to expose her to the same kind of risk her friend had stumbled into. She was bound to be precious to someone.

  “I read the papers, Martin. I get the picture. I know that Bingo Torres is one dangerous Mexican. Just because Vick got his deal without any exposure doesn’t mean Bingo would appreciate people sticking their noses where they don’t belong. You’d better stay away from him.”

  “I plan on it.”

  “Well, what else can we do?”

  “You should dry your hair, and I need to get ready for a gig tonight. I’ll check on you afterwards. If you want, we can go to the police in the morning. How’s that?”

  “Going to the police is fine with me, Martin. I want to know why what happened to Retha happened, and I want the people who did it to pay. You haven’t done your part yet.”

  “There you go again,” I said.

  She was shaking. She looked around the room, at the four walls, at my feet, a lot of white showing in her eyes. “I wish you weren’t playing tonight. I’m scared to go out. Men are still following me.”

  “Just wait here for me, OK?”

  She nodded. “Don’t forget about me. Or Retha.”

  That was not likely.

  &&&

  I didn’t know who would be following Barbra Quiero. I didn’t want it to be Bingo’s men, but I couldn’t imagine who else it would be. Something wasn’t quite right. Bingo had warned me that he’d deal harshly with anyone who was thinking about testifying against him. Maybe Retha hadn’t taken his warning seriously enough.

  But why would Bingo’s men be following Barbra? The deal with IMF was done, history. She’d have nothing to gain by exposing Vick’s relationship with Bingo. And Bingo had little to fear from the exposure of his ties to Vick. Or did he? Maybe something besides payola was the dirty laundry here.

  There was also something off-key about Barbra’s suggestion that Vick tried to have Retha killed over the exposure of his ties to Bingo. He’d told me about their association, and I hadn’t felt like my life was in danger. Besides, Leo had alibied Vick and Ed.

  But that gave me little comfort. When I got home I gave Leo a call. Nadine said he’d gone to sound check. Sound check? We never did a sound check at Antone’s. We’d played there five hundred times, for chrissakes. They just got a new PA system, she said, everyone’s been trying to call you—don’t you check your answering machine anymore? I fed the cat, packed up the Danelectro, and headed over there.

  As I crossed the lake a plane flew overhead, heading west. I wondered if Carson Block was on it. I also wondered if the rest of the IMF crew had gone back to LA. Maybe they were keeping an eye on Barbra. I checked my rearview mirror. As I changed lanes, a late model Ford changed lanes, too. I wondered if someone was keeping an eye on me.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “MIKE CHECK, CHECK ONE TWO.”

  Bam, BAM, buh-duh-duh, buh-duh-duh, BAM-BAM, BOOM.

  “MIKE CHECK, CHECK ONE TWO, CHECK.”

  Some people may assume that a band just shows up at the club a few minutes before show time, has a couple of cocktails and cigarettes, and saunters onstage, plugs in, and lets the magic happen. Sometimes we did it that way, more or less. Especially in Austin at a familiar venue or on the road at a club with a good sound system and staff. On those occasions, the roadies would go down to the club and set up the gear while the band showered, shaved, dressed, and let the road kinks fall out. Then there were the occasions where we didn’t know what kind of sound system, acoustics, or people we’d be dealing with. Sometimes the club manager or promoter would need a bit of schmoozing, or maybe even a show of force. Then the sound check could present all sorts of opportunities, between watching the roadies rewire the club’s equipment, playing pool or video games, doing an interview, or just meeting some of the locals. Sometimes we jammed and had even been known to write a decent song or two during an impromptu rehearsal in front of a happy hour crowd.

  Then there were the times when the PA didn’t work. Or the club manager tried to renegotiate our contract after we pulled in. Or an amp didn’t work, or one of us was hung over or just plain pissed off and we’d have an argument in front of people we didn’t know.

  Buh-DOOM, buh-DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM.

  Doom-CRACK, doo-doom-doom-CRACK, doom- CRACK, doo-doom-doom-CRACK, bip, bip, bip, buh- DOOM-DOOM-CRACK.

  This was not one of those sound checks where we sat and reminisced, jammed, or played pool. Ray was late but Leo was actually drinking a soft drink and behaving himself, and the roadies were working hard. The equalization curve wasn’t set right on the sound system, and Nick was having a hard time figuring out how to adjust it on the new mixing console. The drums sounded good and loud, but there was a gut-wrenching low-frequency ring that would set the woofers roaring with feedback. It was a sound that tickled the soles of my feet, rattled the strings of my bass as it lay across my lap, and made my stomach want to roll over.

  This sound check was hell, and the feedback wasn’t the only thing making my stomach turn. Detective Tom Watson was sitting next to me at a table in the back of the club. He’d followed me there in his late model Ford, an unmarked police car—the car I’d seen in my rearview mirror.

  Watson had short iron-gray hair and a neatly trimmed regulation straight-line mustache of the same color that accentuated the drooping form of a thin-lipped mouth. His blue eyes gleamed with alertness, and the nostrils on his slightly aquiline nose flared frequently when he talked. His shoulders were broad, his posture perfect. I remembered Lasko’s thumbnail sketch: Abilene native, son of a Texas Ranger, born-again hard- ass. It fit.

  He waved another gory 8 x 10 in front of my face. “See these spatter marks down in the comer?” I nodded. “Now look at this,” he said, handing me an X ray of Retha Thomas’s skull.

  “See the crushing wound? See the angle? That straight line was caused by the impact of the body of your bass guitar hitting her near straight on. Back of her skull.”

  “What does it mean?” I said.

  “This was the first blow, son. She had her back turned, standing, when it happened. Maybe she knew the person. After she was hit once, she started to fall and was hit again, in the front of her face, and her chest. The pattern and shape of the droplets on the wall shows that, shows what angle the weapon came down, and so forth.”

  He pulled out another 8 x 10. Seen in a black-and-white close-up, the sawtooth-edge droplets looked like black suns. Another photo showed the comer by the door. There the spatters were in the shape of tadpoles, their skinny tails pointing out the direction they had come from. “She curled up in a fetal position here,” he said, “but the perp kept hitting her. The rest of the wounds bear the peculiar outline of the neck of the instrument, with little notch marks made by the frets.”

  The next photo was of the bed. The sheets were blotched with blood. Her clothes were wadded up against the headboard. Retha wasn’t in it. These photos were taken after she’d been taken to the hospital.

  “We know that she was in bed after the attack, not before,” he said. “And she was in no condition to get there on her own. The perpetrator put her there and ripped off her clothes to make it look like a sex-related crime.
It doesn’t mean it wasn’t, but there was no vaginal penetration, no semen in any of her body cavities.”

  “I hope she lives,” I said. It was a redundant remark, but I felt obligated to inject some hope into the conversation.

  “So do I,” he said. “On the other hand, I know it may sound cold, but we’d know a lot more if she’d been killed, the way it turns out. We can lift fingerprints from a corpse, you know, using superglue fumes, a hair dryer, and orange dye. We can cut open your stomach and determine whether you had lunch at the NightHawk or Threadgill’s. But the doctors and paramedics were concerned with saving her life instead of preserving evidence. That’s how it ought to be, but the crime scene was pretty well trampled, and we have to make do with X rays and doctor’s reports and what you see here in these photos. Plus a little luck and a lot of shoe leather.”

  He wrinkled his nose as he looked around the bar. I got the impression that he never set foot inside one unless it was pertinent to his job. “You know anything about murder?” he asked.

  “I’ve seen victims up close, and I’ve seen people get shot. Is that what you mean?”

  He shook his head, shuffling the photos and putting them back in their folder. “Nah, I’m talking about killing, why and how and when. This is a blunt instrument case. This kind of killing goes all the way back to the day Cain slew Abel. A poker game goes sour and the next thing you know the loser has a table leg in his hand dripping blood and brains. An English professor blows up at his wife for breaking his favorite meerschaum pipe and he picks up the fireplace poker and parts her hair with it. A gun is a whole other matter. You carry a gun, you’ve already got some of the mindset in place to kill, and when you do it, there’s some distance between you and the victim. You can even pretend that it was the gun that did it, that drove you crazy.