“But a blunt instrument is different. You might pick it up and start bashing before you realize what you done. So you gotta be mad, you gotta be in a murderous rage. It’s liable to be messy as hell, and if you’re determined to do the job, it generally takes more than one whack.”
As if to punctuate the remark, a rapid-fire roll of the drums cannoned through the speakers, rattling the ashtray on the table as well as my nerves. Watson scowled at the stage, then at me.
“Lemme see that bass,” he said.
I handed him the Danelectro. “This is a different brand,” I said.
“I know,” he snarled. “The other one was a Fender. Just like your name.” He paused for effect, then turned his attention to the instrument, gripping the neck with both hands, hefting it upside down like a club. “Doesn’t matter. See, this is how the weapon was held for the first couple of blows. Then the perpetrator lost his grip and dropped it or it flew out of his hands.”
He put the bass down on the table, then picked it up by gripping the curved sides of the body, moving it in a short arc. “See,” he said, “the way the neck marks got on her body must have been when the perp held the weapon like this. ”
It looked awkward and it felt awkward, watching him hold the Danelectro like that, and trying to think about trying to hit someone like that, but still the images came. And they were not pleasant.
He put the bass down and looked at me, poker-faced.
“What does this mean?” I said.
“I don’t know. I just know it happened that way. I don’t know why and I don’t know who, but I know that’s the way it happened. The perp, who was your height, give or take a half a foot, lost his grip and picked it up again by the body. In the meantime, the victim crawled or stumbled across the room. It was lucky, actually, because the firmer grip and better swing he had going with the first couple of blows were offset slightly by the fact the victim was standing, and her head was able to move with the blow. When she was crumpled up on the floor against the wall is when she could’ve really got her brains splattered. Here,” he said, picking up the bass by the neck. I took it and put the strap back on the pegs and slung it over my shoulder.
He looked pleased with the image, as if I’d just put my own noose around my neck.
“He kept hitting her after she was balled up in the comer,” he said. “Another reason for hitting her with this other grip was probably because of the awkward angle there in the comer. And that indicates to me that he knew what he was doing, he wasn’t just mad, he wanted to make sure he got the job done.”
He looked at me like he was daring me to disagree with his conclusions. I said nothing.
“I don’t like you, Fender,” he said. “I don’t like you at all, and I’m under no obligation to treat you kindly. I get the same paycheck whether the crime was committed against a decent person or scum, and more often than not, things like this are perpetrated against people like you. And that’s no coincidence. This is my job and I don’t have to bullshit you.”
“Is that what you came here to tell me, or were you just trying to gross me out with these photos?”
He sucked in his lower lip, making a clucking sound. “You think you’re some kind of wiseass and you pal around with Lasko thinking that gives you some sorta carte blanche, but it doesn’t. You’re an ordinary citizen, not a cop, and what’s more, you’re a sinful heathen. I came here to tell you I don’t want you calling motel managers under false pretenses trying to do my job for me. And I don’t want you hanging around with Bingo Torres. He’s got enough trouble.”
“So you know Retha had a visitor by the name of B. Q. Torres, and she was here on behalf of IMF.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know all that. But I don’t think Bingo left his house Sunday night. He’s just about to be indicted by the grand jury and has been under what you might call a watchful eye, you know.”
“Meaning he’s under surveillance and you know for a fact that he didn’t leave home?”
He shook his head slightly, winking his left eye. “I said he was under surveillance. The feds have been dragging their feet, and we’ve had a manpower shortage ourselves, so surveillance has been spotty at times. Besides, he’s awfully cagey.”
“You didn’t answer my question about whether he left the house Sunday night. Did he?”
“No, I didn’t. I didn’t even say if I knew if he did or not. I just said I didn’t think he left.”
“And if you knew, you wouldn’t necessarily tell me about it.” He nodded. As far as nonanswers go, he had Carson Block beat. “What about the record company guys?”
“I’m checking them out.” He slid his chair back and got up, hitched up his pants, and buttoned his jacket. Not, however, before giving me a generous glimpse of his shoulder holster and handcuffs. “Lemme tell you something, Fender, and I hope it’s the last time I have to tell you. I got a job to do, and I don’t need your help. You got your own job, scummy as it is.”
“MIKE CHECK, MIKE CHECK, TESTING ONE-TWO,” came Nick’s voice, thundering over the PA. “Martin, are you ready? MARTIN FENDER TO THE BANDSTAND, PLEASE.”
“Looks like they want you,” said Watson.
“Yeah,” I said. I got up and held the neck of the bass up straight so it wouldn’t hit anything as I walked up to the stage.
The next time I looked back he was still standing there, glaring at me. A waitress approached him with a drink tray, but he brushed her off with a cold stare.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The low notes rumbled out of my bass like the growls of an angry dog.
“Route 66,” “Spoonful,” “Shakin’ All Over,” “Hellhounds on My Trail.”
The strap cut into my shoulder like that angry dog’s leash.
“Mannish Boy,” “What a Woman,” “Take Me to the River.”
By midnight Antone’s was packed with crinoline skirts and leather jackets and halter tops and pinstripe suits and 501 button flies and wing tips and beaded cocktail dresses. Conk-crowned heads mingled with high flies, Stetsons, stingy brims, gimme caps, and beehives. In other words, the usual eclectic mix in the usual swirls of smoke.
Clifford Antone, godfather of the Austin blues scene, came out of his office, white shirt collar spread open wide over the lapels of his black suit, nodding approval. The long-legged queen of R & B, Lou Ann Barton, stood at his side, nursing a tall cocktail and crushing a cigarette under one stiletto heel.
Ladonna and Michael were there, Lasko and Barbra Quiero were not. A beaming, rotund Vick Travis trundled up in his leather jacket, and a caveman Ed the Head in a white bib shirt and black tux jacket sat next to the mixing board, midway between the dance floor and the front of the club. The halogen lamp over the console sprayed out over Vick’s table, so I was able to keep an eye on him. Like a guard dog.
Billy kept the beat steady and sweaty, a mileage logbook sticking out of his back pocket. Ray blew his horn like a pomade-slick demon from hell, turning a cold shoulder on the other band members, especially Leo. Leo ignored Ray too, and played well despite the cast on his hand. Sometime between sound check and the first song, he’d switched from sodas to Jack Daniel’s. Nadine wobbled on a stool by the dressing room door. She spent more time looking down at the blue drink in her hand than she did looking up at us. The wound was still there, whatever it was. My bass kept growling.
Oh, man. Saturday night and it had been a hell of a week. I felt like I was in a different dimension, standing up there onstage after all that had happened. I felt like a man inside a television. I told myself it was just a combination of mood and too-bright lights in my eyes as I watched the people who were watching us. I told myself it was just an illusion. But it wasn’t.
“Who Put the Sting on the Honey Bee,” “Born Lover,” “The Crawl,” “Cadillac Daddy.”
The bass notes shook the room like thunder: Vick would look at Leo and his new guitar, and Leo would look up from it and Vick would look away. Ed the Head looked hard and compact and menacin
g, a baboon in a tuxedo. People would pass by Vick’s table and he would give a robust laugh, pumping their hands, insisting that he buy them a drink, then erupt again, as if that was the funniest thing in the world. Then he’d look back up at the stage, and I knew. He was watching me. Not just what I played, or my face, or my clothes. But something, some part of me. More than once I checked to see if my fly was down. It was not a healthy feeling.
Bingo Torres came in during the last song before our break. The two cronies I’d seen poolside, Roberto and Nameless, followed in his shadow. Bingo seemed to be looking up toward stage right, Leo’s side. When Leo stepped up to the mike to sing “Trailer Park Babe,” Bingo appeared to shake his head with disgust, elbowing Roberto, pointing. Soon the thrift shop proprietor maneuvered his heavy torso around to see who was standing behind him, and the Payola King appeared to look at him like the sole of a shoe looks at the back of a cockroach.
That was when I knew that there was something to the weird sensation of being a man inside a television set. Some of these characters were watching us, wearing their secrets on their faces, unaware or just not caring that I noticed. I felt like an actor onstage, suddenly realizing that some of the actors in the play were reading from scripts that were different than mine. But as I studied the psychic interplay between Bingo, Vick, and Leo, I had the feeling that I was about to be able to read between the lines.
We went one more time on the chorus, held up on the root while Leo scratched out a descending pattern starting on the fifth, clanged out the root chord, and waited for a buh-duh-dum on Billy’s rack and snare and we were done. As the MC announced that we’d be right back after a short break, the stage floor began to shake with deep, rolling feedback. Nick trotted up to the stage to see what was wrong.
I leaned my bass in its stand and turned off the power switch on my amp. I didn’t want it to overheat.
&&&
I hung my jacket on a hook in the dressing room, toweled off with a sour-smelling bar rag, and let Leo bum a cigarette. Ray and Billy ducked out ahead of us, and the tiny dressing room was soon as empty as it was ugly. The set had gone well, but there was either too much or too little that the four of us could say to one another at that point in time.
I walked Ladonna to her car.
“You sound good tonight,” she said. Michael skipped on ahead of us.
“Thanks,” I said. “And you look damn good. I don’t usually line anything up during breaks, but maybe I should get your number, sweet thing.”
She laughed, tugging my arm, walking briskly through the parking lot. She was tired and Michael needed to get to bed, but she wasn’t anxious to leave. Maybe she hadn’t been able to see the way that Vick was looking at Leo, or the way that
Bingo was looking at the two of them, but she knew I’d seen things in a way that I hadn’t seen them before.
“And there’s something else,” she said as she unlocked her door and got in. “You’re hard, Martin, like you’ve taken a drug. But I know you don’t take drugs, so I know what it is.” I didn’t deny I had a gun.
“A gun is a bad idea waiting to happen, Martin,” she said. “Statistically, just carrying a gun increases your chances of getting shot.”
“A gun is a gun, and it’s just there, in my guitar case. I’m here, I’m me, and I’m not a gun-toting maniac.”
She gave me one of her long meaningful looks, then put the keys in the ignition and made sure that Michael had fastened his seat belt. After accepting a kiss, she locked the doors and said, “You’re going to see Vick after?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’ve got to. Don’t worry.”
“OK.” But she didn’t mean it. We kissed again, and she put her meaning there.
&&&
We rushed through the last set. It wasn’t sloppy or soulless, but it lacked. It lacked a bit of funk as the rhythms stumbled over the groove, and the tempos rushed along feverishly, like we were running from something.
But midway during the instrumental section of “Nails in My Heart,” Leo’s tone began to soar. He overcame the sluggishness of his right-hand attack by squeezing more vibrato-strangled sound out of his fretting fingers. The notes seemed to be crying out a painful confession. High up on the neck the fingers climbed, feedback threatening, sweat pouring off his face. He climaxed with a long, four-note wail wrenched out of the same fret position, then raked his pick down the neck to the nut, whanged an open chord, and fell back against his amp. Ray growled out the melody on his sax for the last twelve bars, and we ended the song. After a round of applause and a muttered thank you, we launched into the last song and a perfunctory encore. But they were ordinary and as earthbound as most of the rest of the set had been, and once again, I felt like we had cheated our audience.
We got paid anyway, of course, and I divided the cash into equal amounts after deducting Nick and Steve’s cuts, minus their advances. Billy marked down the amount in his ledger, Ray folded his share in a gold money clip and started to walk out to his Buick, where Kate would be sitting impatiently, her nose in the air, punching the buttons on the radio with black lacquered nails. I hadn’t paid Leo yet. I asked Ray to wait up.
He stopped in the tracks of his creepers just long enough to spit over the padded shoulder of his jacket: “What?”
“Is that it, Ray?” I asked. “If you’re walking out, I’d like to know why.”
“Ask Leo.” With that, he started walking again, and didn’t look back.
Leo, pale-faced and sweaty, was coming out of the dressing room. Nadine was still in there. He saw the look on my face and started to turn back. I hurried over and grabbed his sleeve. “What is it, Leo?”
“What is what?”
“Why does everybody say, Ask Leo?”
The dark circles didn’t soften the panic in his eyes, and the surliness in his voice didn’t pass for bravery. “Maybe they think I know everything.”
“How’d you get that Flying V?”
“Whaddya mean?”
“You got a new guitar, and I know you didn’t come off the road with enough money to buy one. You also got a broken hand and a very upset girlfriend, all in one day. And I saw the way that Vick was looking at you. Is Vick your banker, your boyfriend, or what?”
“Fuck you, Martin,” he blurted, and pulled away so that his sleeve ripped off in my hand. He looked at the damage, then me. “You guys, man. Ray’s a goddamn West Texas puritan and you’re a goddamn hardass. Just a rock solid dude. Aren’t ya? Even after some chick gets bashed up with your guitar.
You don’t know shit, you don’t understand a goddamn thing.” He leaned into my face. “Not a goddamn thing.”
Then he backed away toward the dressing room door. He looked like he wanted to say something else as a big fat tear ran out from the corner of his eye and shot down by his nose. He spun and hit the exit door and bolted through it. I held it open and looked out and saw him sprint across Guadalupe, dodging cars, then disappear around a corner.
The club was empty except for a couple of guys with mops, the sound man, and Clifford Antone, hands in his pockets, asking Nadine if she wanted him to call a cab. I gave her Leo’s money. I felt bad for her. She grabbed my hand.
“Did you see his cast?” she said, sobbing.
“What about it?”
“Bingo made him let him sign it. He wrote, ‘Another gift from Vick Travis.’ A heart around it and everything.”
She put her head down in her hands and cried. Clifford put his arm around her and nodded at me. He’d take care of her.
I got out of there as quickly as I could. I felt soiled by shame--Leo’s shame, for sinking so low that he would get his hand broken over a debt, and my shame, for not catching his fall.
When I got to the car with my bass, Barbra Quiero was in the passenger seat.
&&&
“I had to know,” she was saying, “I just had to know.”
The traffic was light but awkward, the drivers overly careful as they left the clubs smelling lik
e DWIs. Some of the traffic lights had switched over to blinking amber or red after midnight, making the city seem like it was sleeping with one eye open. I was wary, too, a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel to keep my hands from shaking.
My damp clothes clung. In the morning they’d smell like a million cigarettes. The three a.m. air felt leaden, even with the top down, peeled back on a murky sky. Barbra’s words seemed to fall into a deadened void quickly after she spoke them, as if the night were too tired for resonance.
Six days before I’d taken a ride with her friend after my first gig back in my hometown. Hometown. I’d felt like a stranger here. Now it was feeling a bit more familiar again as we took Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard, then Red River back into downtown. But instead of a cozy feeling, it felt like a bad déjà vu.
“That flashy Mexican guy,” she was saying, “was Bingo Torres?” I nodded yes, that was his name. “One of the guys who was with him is one of the guys that have been following me the past few days, off and on.”
We pulled up at the Radisson. “Well, now we know,” I said. “You’d better stay in your room.”
“I will,” she said. She grabbed me and pulled me to her. She was shaking, her body cold and clammy. She wouldn’t let go.
Finally I pried her away. “Maybe I should go up with you,” I said. She nodded. I put the hazard lights on, got out and opened her door for her, and escorted her through the lobby, to the elevator, and down the hall to her room. I unlocked the door for her and checked out the room. It was empty.
“OK?” I said.
“OK.” I started to give her room key back but she wouldn’t take it. “Maybe you’ll want to come back before tomorrow morning.”
Tough Baby (Martin Fender Novel) Page 15