Die Laughing 2: Five More Comic Crime Novels

by Ben Rehder

  Special thanks to D. Victor Hawkins, with whom I worked at WZZQ, for constant consultation on every aspect of this story. Many of the segues alluded to in these pages sprung from our Tuesday evening get-togethers while I wrote this book.

  Also to Steve Larson, fellow ex-rock radio guy, for helping with programming and music issues from a larger market perspective. And belatedly, for putting Radio Free Comedy on the air in Seattle at KJET.

  Regarding matters outside of radio, my thanks to the following for their help: Chris Purser, Geoff Purser, and Steve Shirley for sharing their knowledge of the Mississippi woods; Cynthia Speetjens, Al Nuzzo, J. Brion Morrisette, and Don and Joni Langevoort for helping with legal issues; Don Winslow for his help on matters of arson; Janine Smith and Kendall Fitzhugh for their notes and for taking the time to listen to me jabber about plot points until I figured them out; Maureen O’Brien for saying the book was perfect, even it it’s not; and James C. Vines, who agreed with her.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In writing a novel set in the world of radio, one finds it necessary to use call letters to identify different radio stations. The only problem is that call letters come and go like the wind. Had I used call letters that were not in use at the time I wrote this story, they might have come into used before we published. The ones I ended up using may be out of use by the time this gets into a book store. So here is my rationale for the call letters I used in the following tale:

  Many stations select call letters to reflect the city they’re in. I opted to do the same. I used KBDN to refer to a station in Bismark, North Dakota (as of the day I write this, a news-talk station in Bend, Oregon uses these call letters). I used WVBR to refer to a station in Vicksburg, Mississippi(at this moment, these are the call letters for a rock station in Ithaca, New York).

  Other stations select call letters to reflect their format. Many years ago there was a format known in the industry as AOR, which stood for Album Oriented Radio (as distinct from Top 40 radio, which was singles oriented). Over the next two decades, AOR evolved into what is now known as the Classic Rock format. Since this story is set at a classic rock station, I gave it the call letters WAOR-FM. As of this moment, WAOR-FM happens to be a classic rock station in South Bend, Indiana.

  All of that is another way of saying this is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents, and radio station call letters are products of the author’s imagination (as limited by FCC rules) or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, radio stations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  1.

  It was hard to say which looked more depressed, the seventies-era shopping center or the man pulling into its parking lot. Both had seen brighter days, though in fairness it had to be said the man wore it better than the shopping center.

  He called himself Rick Shannon and there was a semi-tragic, end-of-the-line aspect about him. Time had chipped the youthful cockiness off the outside, but some of his underlying swagger remained. There were men Rick’s age who envied his thick head of hair, others envied his freedom. The two things Rick had plenty of, freedom and hair, the currency of the sixties. But, like the songwriter said, the former was just another word for nothing left to lose. The latter, well, Rick could still lose that.

  There were more weeds than cars in the parking lot. Half the storefronts were boarded, the rest were just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Rick parked his truck. This was exactly what he swore he’d never do. But here he was. He killed the engine and sat there, staring at the dashboard. The gas gauge. Empty. Same as his wallet. He mumbled, “Fuck.”

  Rick was unemployed again. When he worked, he worked in radio. He’d grown up listening to AM, when Yesterday and Satisfaction were Top 40 hits, when radio was all about singles. But his first job was on FM, during album-oriented radio’s heyday. He’d been the youngest jock at the station when Imagine and Sticky Fingers were new. A few decades later Rick was doing the night shift at KBND-FM, Bismarck, North Dakota. Rockin’ the Sioux State at 99.9. The pay was adequate and Bismarck was, well, it was more like every other city these days. The same franchised fast food and twenty-screen cineplexes lining indistinguishable main drags, town after town. Rick had worked in dozens of cities. He’d seen it everywhere. Homogenization was just a sign of the times.

  Especially in radio. More stations owned by fewer corporations. Consultants and music researchers conspiring to make everything sound the same. And they weren’t even looking for songs people liked. The research was geared to find songs people didn’t dislike. That’s what they played to keep listeners until the next commercial break. That’s what so much of radio had become.

  So Rick had been playing all the rock radio clichés until Clean Signal Radio Corporation bought the station and broomed the staff. It was Clean Signal’s fifth station in the market and it showed. All sense of community had vanished as the satellite feed bounced in voice-tracked jocks fromChicago and Florida.

  As he had walked out of KBND’s studios with his final check, Rick had thought about how media watchers in the fifties had predicted that television would be the ruin of radio. He wondered if anyone would appreciate the irony that radio had killed itself.

  Rick mailed tapes and resumés all over the country and spread the word on the grapevine. He was available. A rock-steady pro with production skills, on-air talent, whatever. Rick tried not to dwell on the fact that he and all the other DJs of his era were like silent movie stars at the dawn of the talkies. By and large their skills didn’t transfer to the new iteration of the medium and they would soon be forgotten and replaced as things changed.

  And now Rick found himself parked outside a storefront under a sign that said: B-Side Vinyl – We Buy and Sell Used Tapes, CD’s, and LP’s. It was either this or start bouncing checks.

  Rick looked down at his arm. He knew that big fat vein, blue and pulsing, was a potential source of revenue, a renewable resource he could tap again and again. But he also knew plasma didn’t fetch much and, besides, that had always seemed to Rick like such a sure sign of having reached the last resort. He couldn’t bring himself to check in there. Not yet anyway. So he had tapped his record collection instead.

  Looking up and down the sidewalk in front of the shopping center, Rick saw only one person, a man who looked to be in his sixties. His shopping cart brimmed with indistinguishable bundles, folded cardboard boxes, a water jug, plastic bags filled with crushed cans. His face was sunburned and peeling as his cracked lips wrapped around the mouth of a bottle.

  Rick took this as a reminder that things could be worse. He got out of his truck and walked around to the other side. He opened the passenger door and looked at the box filled with rare albums, including an original UK version of Pink Floyd’s The Piper At The Gates of Dawn, signed by the entire band. Rick had promised himself that he wasn’t going to part with that for less than two hundred. Of course more than once he’d made the promise that he’d never sell any of his records, but things change.

  Rick picked up the box and kicked the door shut. As he approached B-Side Vinyl, the homeless man made eye contact and extended a hand. “Help out a fellow record buff?”

  Rick paused, a sympathetic look on his face. “Sorry,” he said, shrugging with the heavy box in his hands. “Trying to get some together myself.”

  The old man gave a nod. “Don’t sell ‘em all,” he said. “Hang on to something, you know, just in case.”

  Rick smiled and said, “Thanks for the advice.” He pushed the door open and stepped inside. The bouquet of cardboard, dust, and vinyl welcomed him. Nothing else smelled quite like a room full of old albums. The cobwebs in the corners of the store spoke volumes. There were no other customers, just the owner sitting behind the counter reading a magazine. He lowered the magazine and looked over the top of his glasses. “Cleaning out your attic?”

  Rick set the box on the counter and said, “Something like that.”<
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  The man put his hands on the box. “Cash or store credit?”

  “Cash.”

  The guy slid the records from their sleeves. He held them at angles to look for scratches. Rick walked down an aisle rooting through the record bins out of habit, his fingers deft at flipping the albums, mostly dreck from the early 1980's: Whitney Houston, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Flock of Seagulls.

  The owner was about halfway through the box when he said, “You work in radio?”

  Rick paused before answering. “Used to.”

  “Least you got out in time. Not like old J.J.,” he said, nodding toward the sidewalk.

  Rick looked up from the record bin and said, “J.J.?” His eyes went to the homeless man. “As in J.J. Maguire?”

  “The very same.” The man nodded. “Jukebox Johnny.”

  He was a Top 40 Radio legend, one of the big boss jocks of the era. “He was huge,” Rick said. “Had like a forty share in San Francisco.”

  “You believe it? Big as he was, and ends up on the sidewalk? Couldn’t adapt, I guess. After the glory days he drank himself into a job at an oldies station here. By the time they went automated, he was a serious hooch hound, couldn’t get work. Started showing up here with his 45's.”

  Rick saw Johnny’s head titling back. “Hate hearing stories like that.” He didn’t want to think about how they struck too close for comfort.

  “J.J. sold me all but one of his records,” the man said. “No matter how bad he needs the money, he can’t bring himself to sell that last one.” The man waved Rick’s original copy of Skynyrd’s Street Survivors toward the door and said, “Somewhere in that pile of junk there’s a clean copy of the Beatles Please, Please Me on Vee Jay. Probably worth four hundred bucks,” he said. “You believe that?”

  Rick shook his head and wondered what he would hang on to if it came down to that.

  The man finished looking through Rick’s box and said, “You got some great stuff here.”

  “Yeah, what’re they worth?”

  “Well, what they’re worth is a different question,” the guy said. “But I can only give you fifty for the lot.”

  Rick didn’t hide his surprise. “Fifty? I figure they’re worth a couple of thousand.”

  “Sure, to collectors, none of whom live in Bismarck as far as I been able to tell.”

  Rick looked at the guy. “Fifty’s the best you can do?”

  The guy shrugged and scratched his head. “Or a hundred store credit. Not much demand for this stuff anymore.”

  “Yeah.” Rick nodded. “Not anymore.”

  “You probably do better selling them on-line.”

  “Except I need the money now.”

  “That’s usually the case.”

  Rick slid the box toward himself and pulled out the Pink Floyd. “What can you give me for this?”

  The man looked Rick up and down. “I tell you what,” he said. “You’re in a spot? I can give you, say, ten bucks.”

  Rick shook his head and explained the differences between the U.S. and the U.K. versions of the album.

  “Okay,” the guy said. “Twenty.”

  “It’s signed by the entire band.” Rick pointed at the album’s psychedelic cover. “Look, that’s Syd Barrett’s signature.”

  The guy figured he could get fifty bucks selling it on line. “All right,” he said. “Thirty.”

  “It’s the original pressing,” Rick insisted. “There’s not a scratch on it and not only that–”

  The guy reached into a drawer and pulled out some money. “You want the thirty or not?”

  Rick looked at the cash for a moment. Then he reached out and took it. “Thanks.” He grabbed his box and carried it outside.

  Jukebox Johnny looked up from the sidewalk. “How’d you do?”

  Rick’s head rocked back and forth. “Coulda been worse,” he said.

  Johnny nodded at the box. “Glad to see you kept a few.”

  “Yeah, well, just in case, right?” Rick put the albums into the man’s shopping cart and said, “See what you can get for ‘em.” Then he turned and headed for his truck.

  2.

  Jack Carter was handcuffed to a fence in the backwoods of Deckern County, Mississippi. The fence was an old property line, rough hand split cedar and barbed wire. Here, it was a tangent to a small clearing. Loblolly pines and a lone white oak tree surrounded Jack Carter, as if gathered to watch him die. There was a creek nearby, swollen by the rain. Things were muddy and bleak as Jack struggled and sobbed and sank slowly in the red clay muck.

  He coughed and choked when a black cloud of diesel exhaust swallowed his face. The fumes came from the back-hoe operating a few feet closer than safety regulations suggest. The back-hoe, mounted on a big crawler, was digging a hole large enough for a man.

  Jack Carter shouted over the machine noise, pleading for his life, offering bribes he had no hope of delivering, then apologizing for his misdeeds, then cursing his fate. A flash of lightning illuminated his doomed, rain-soaked face.

  One-Mississippi. Two-Mississippi. Three-Mississippi. Thunder.

  The back-hoe operator finished the hole then climbed down from the idling tractor, a Smith & Wesson .45 in his hand. He approached the fence with an expression like putting down a bad dog. Grim but not sad, business that had to be done.

  “You can’t do this,” Jack Carter shouted as he pulled against the fence. “Please! I won’t tell anybody. Nobody has to know!”

  The back-hoe operator looked to the sky, waiting. It came a moment later. Another flash and he raised the gun. One-Mississippi. Two-Mississippi. No one heard the shot as the thunder rumbled through the woods.

  For a moment, the rain and the rushing creek were the only things to hear. Then the sound of a boot sucking out of a wet hole and then another as the back-hoe operator stepped closer to the fence. He removed the handcuffs then returned to the crawler. He climbed into the seat and laid his hands on the control sticks. The hydraulic arm jerked and the steel-toothed bucket shook as it reached down and dragged the body into the hole.

  3.

  When Rick got back to his apartment, his machine was flashing. He had one message. Beep. “Yeah, Rick? Clay Stubblefield, WAOR, McRae, Miss’ippi. We’re an FM rocker with an opening for someone with experience. I heard you were available. Now I need to move on this quick, so gimme a call if you’re innersted.”

  Rick thought about it. Mississippi. Oh, Lord. But it was a job, and not far from some decent markets, Memphis, New Orleans, parts of Florida. It didn’t take him long to decide he was, in fact, ‘innersted.’ So he called Clay Stubblefield and struck a deal. The gig was seven to midnight plus the usual production duties. The pay wasn’t great but Rick knew a little went a long way in a small Mississippi town. The job also came with a spacious apartment near the studios for only three hundred a month, so the next morning Rick loaded eighteen Peaches Record Store crates full of albums into the back of his truck and headed south.

  Rick was returning to the Magnolia State after a long time gone. He’d grown up in Jackson, where he had his first radio gig, so he had a history with the place. He still had a few relatives there along with some friends from high school, and an old girlfriend or two.

  Rick drove through Sioux Falls, Omaha, Kansas City, St. Louis, and Memphis. As he scanned the dial, finding each city indistinguishable from the last, Rick kept thinking about J.J. Maguire and wondering who was to blame for the old man’s fate. Of course Rick knew the answer, he just didn’t like it. He wanted to hold someone else accountable, preferably some faceless consultant. But he knew the truth was simpler than that. Things had changed and J.J. Maguire had refused to change with them. And now Rick was starting to ask himself if it was time for him to change too, lest he end up on the sidewalk outside a used record store. But change how? Into what?

  As he crossed the state line into Mississippi, Rick told himself not to worry. He didn’t have to deal with that at the moment. He was on his way to a new job.
Change could wait.

  Rick crossed the Deckern County line just before three and tuned the radio to 102.9 FM. They were in a commercial break, a classic small market radio spot, bad copy read at a machine-gun pace. “Behind on your bills? Credit card balances piling up? Tired of paying late fees? Need quick cash? We can help! Universal Financial Services has the solution to all your problems. Got bad credit? We don’t believe it! Universal Financial Services wants to give you an advance on your next paycheck without embarrassing credit checks.” It was annoying but you’d remember Universal Financial Services. The spot ended with, “UFS? It’s the best!”

  The DJ came out of the spot break. “This is WAOR-FM, McRae, Mississippi. Classic rock for Deckern County!” When he heard the opening licks of Whole Lotta Love by Zeppelin, Rick had to groan. He thought, So many good songs, so few of ‘em played.

  Ten minutes later Rick hit the outskirts of McRae. He passed a billboard: Home of Central Mississippi University – Go Pant s! It was supposed to say, Go Panthers! but the ‘her’ had been painted over by some drunk frat boys. Rick drove past a lumber yard, an equipment rental place, a couple of motels. A few miles ahead, at the town’s center, the highway crossed Bilbo Avenue, the town’s main drag. Rick turned east. It looked the same as the main drag in Bismarck, all the same franchises. A few miles later, he pulled into a parking lot.

  Rick stared at the building, his new office – an unpainted, t-shaped cinder-block structure. Mounted above the door in red blocks two feet tall were the call letters, WAOR-AM & FM. At the far end of the parking lot was a van with a fancy paint job, no doubt known as the WAOR Prize Patrol Van or something similar. Rick sat there, absorbing the glamour of the moment and wondering about his choice of professions. Fifteen cities in twenty years, he thought. At least I get to travel.