Die Laughing 2: Five More Comic Crime Novels

by Ben Rehder

  Rick put the butter away and had his toast dry with some black coffee. He looked out to the woods and thought about taking a walk for some much needed exercise and, as long as he was out there, he’d look for the carport that had blown off in the storm. Unfortunately he had to get to work. He wanted to tell Traci about his chat with Donna Moore and find out if she’d heard from her friend in the used car business. The exercise would have to wait.

  “You’ve outdone yourself,” Rick said when he saw Traci. She’d created a sexy sort of Cat Woman effect with her eyeliner and mascara.

  Traci made a suggestive cat noise and said, “Kitty needs some love.”

  “I could make a scratching-post joke,” Rick said. “But I think you’d rather hear about my meeting with Donna Moore late last night.”

  “What? Why didn’t you–” Traci held up a finger when the phone rang. She pushed a button on the switchboard. “Dubya-ay-oh-ahhr,” she said. “Mmm. Hold please.” She directed the call then looked back at Rick. “Ohmigod, what’d she say?”

  Rick told her about DeWayne Ragsdale and how it looked like Clay had fixed the contest. He handed her the newspaper he’d taken from her desk the night before. She looked at the photo but said she didn’t recognize the guy. “You think he knows something?”

  “Bound to know something,” Rick said. “Question is, does he know something useful? And would he tell me if he did?”

  “You gonna talk to him?”

  “Not yet,” Rick said. “I wanna talk to Joni Lang first. I think she might have seen something.” He picked up the Rolodex and found her number.

  “Oh, by the way,” Traci said. “My friend said there hasn’t been a Corvette up for auction in over a year. He said he’d know too, ‘cause he’d have bought it.”

  Rick gave that a moment’s thought. “Well, that’s too bad. Woulda been nice to find it.”

  Traci glanced over her shoulder to see if anyone was coming down the hall before she said, “Also, I called Tammy Callaway to ask her if she knows anything about. . .” She lowered her voice here. “. . .about the woman Clay said wanted him to pee on her. But she wasn’t there, so I left a message for her to call me back.”

  “I’d love to know how you’re gonna phrase that question.”

  Traci waved a hand, dismissing his concern. “Oh, me and Tammy got to be pretty good friends while she was here. She quit because Clay wouldn’t stop playing grab-ass with her. If she’s got any dirt on him, she’ll shovel it my way.”

  Rick’s expression changed abruptly. “Hey, today’s payday, right?”

  “Yeah, but not ‘till after three.”

  “That’s okay, I’m not looking for the check.” Rick headed for the hallway.

  54.

  The bookkeeper wasn’t in. Rick went over to the grey metal filing cabinet and opened a drawer. He read the file labels until he came across one that said: Contest W-9s. He pulled the file and looked inside. There were several W-9 forms from earlier cash giveaways but nothing for Ken Stigler or DeWayne Ragsdale.

  “Lookin’ for something?” It was the bookkeeper, standing in the doorway.

  “Yeah,” Rick said. “My paycheck.” He shoved the file back in the drawer and closed it.

  “You’re not going to find it in there.” The bookkeeper crossed the room and opened the drawer, forcing Rick to step aside. The bookkeeper saw the W-9 file out of place. He pulled it out, then filed it properly before shutting and locking the cabinet. “Your check’ll be in your employee mail slot after three. Meanwhile I’d appreciate it if you’d keep your nose outta my drawers.” The two men looked at each other briefly before the bookkeeper said, “You know what I mean.”

  Rick went back to his office to do an air check review with Autumn before she started her shift. He hit the play button on the cassette player and said, “Just listen.” James Taylor’s Mud Slide Slim was shuffling toward its end when David Bowie and Mick Ronson came roaring in with Star from Ziggy Stardust. Rick stopped the tape. “See now, that’s a bit jarring,” he said. “You might have found something a little softer to follow JT.”

  Autumn held her hands up in defense. “Somebody requested Bowie,” she said. “I’m just trying to give folks what they want.”

  “I understand.” Rick held up copies of Mud Slide Slim and Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. “Come with me.” He led her to the production room. “Not that you usually want to follow JT with the Thin White Duke, but if you do, you might try something like this.” He put the needle near the end of Mud Slide Slim then cued Rock and Roll Suicide by Bowie. As James Taylor faded out, Rick started the Bowie. A slowly strummed acoustic guitar took over from JT, making a nice transition from one to the other.

  “Hey, that’s pretty good,” Autumn said. “I just went with a song I knew off of Ziggy.”

  “If you’re not familiar with a record, just drop the needle at the start of all the tracks and listen for something that sort of matches the end of what you’re playing.”

  After Autumn went on the air, Rick met with J.C. They had their usual arguments. J.C. once again accused Rick of trying to stifle his on-air personality. Rick reminded him that the format was more about music than personality. “And speaking of the music,” he said. “I’m still hearing a lot more metal than I’d like.”

  “Well, you know, sometimes I feel like it’s my job to keep the station from sounding like a twenty-four-hour-a-day folk festival. But, I’ll work on it.”

  Afterward Rick called Joni Lang. His pretext was wanting to discuss the possibility of Joni participating in another station promotion. He asked if they could meet that afternoon but she said she was busy until seven. For a minute Rick thought she was giving him the run around but then she offered to come down to the station while he was on the air that night. “But only if your general manager isn’t going to be there,” she said.

  Rick remembered how Clay had palmed Joni’s ass at the park that day and figured she didn’t want any more of that. He assured Joni that Clay wouldn’t be at the station after five.

  He started his shift at eight. Autumn stayed for a few minutes while she filed her CDs and records before she said good night. On her way out the door, Rick asked her to kill the overhead lights. There were several light configurations that helped create different moods in the on-air studio. Different jocks preferred different lighting. Autumn liked to work under full brights, in this case, a row of fluorescent tubes overhead. Rick had always favored a darker room. He switched on the cool blue and red spotlights over the control board. Off to the side was a desk lamp on a dimmer that he brought up to the glow of a few candles. It soothed him and put him in the right mood for the music.

  Rick started the nine o’clock hour with Gino Vanelli’s Storm At Sunup. Joni arrived a few minutes later. She was wearing jeans and a Hard Rock Café (Las Vegas) T-shirt. It was late enough for Rick to start playing longer songs which would give them an opportunity to talk with fewer interruptions. Hearing the end of Storm At Sunup in his mind, he pulled Quadrophenia and cued side four.

  They made small talk for a few minutes while Rick waited to get into the Who. Joni allowed as how her last name was really Langevoort. “I shortened it to Lang for entertainment industry purposes,” she said.

  Rick went into the Who, overlapping the storm sound effects for the easy segue. Doctor Jimmy, The Rock, and Love Reign O’er Me would play for twenty-one minutes. He turned the monitors down and spun around in his chair. He spoke matter-of-factly, going for a lawyerly tone. “Joni? I have to tell you. I lied about why I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Joni said, point blank. “I lied when I said I’d be interested in doing another promotion with your station.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah.” She looked at him skeptically. “I hope you didn’t invite me down here to hit on me.”

  “Uhh, no.” Rick shook his head and assumed a severe countenance. “I wanted to talk to you about a possible legal matter.” He leaned forward
and dropped his voice. “In fact there may be an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission and I wanted to–”

  “Is it about the contest?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Good because I saw something and I wanted to tell somebody but I didn’t know who. I thought about going to the police but I saw Mr. Stubblefield talking with the cops at the park that day and it looked like they were pretty friendly. So I thought about getting a lawyer, but, well, here’s what happened,” she said. “I drew the first two names and he read ‘em, and then I drew the third name and I handed it to him. But he did a switch.” Joni mimicked Clay’s awkward hand movements. “He had another one of the entry forms in his other hand. That’s the name he called out. Later, I saw him toss something in the trash and I pulled it out and looked at it to make sure I wasn’t imagining things.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I just didn’t know what to do with it.”

  Rick told her to keep it in a secure place, a safe-deposit box if she had one. “The FCC will be in touch about your testimony when the time comes,” he said with far more authority than he had.

  Of course the FCC didn’t know anything about the contest, at least not yet. But Rick knew there was a rule requiring broadcast stations to fully disclose the material terms of any contest or promotion they conducted. Failure to disclose that the contest was fixed was an obvious violation. He wondered if basic fraud statutes might also apply. In any event, Rick would contact the feds when the time was right. Meanwhile, Joni seemed to be growing anxious about things and Rick thought that invoking a federal bureaucracy would be comforting in some way.

  “Am I in any danger?”

  “Nooooo.” Rick gave an exaggerated frown and shook his head. “Don’t worry about that. He has no idea he’s under investigation.” He wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to her. “Here’s my cell number. Call if you need me.”

  Joni took the number and said she would make herself available to federal authorities when the time came and that she’d keep the evidence in a safe place in the meanwhile. “But there’s something I don’t understand,” she said. “Are you, like, an undercover cop or something? I don’t get why you’re the one telling me this instead of the FCC people.”

  “My reputation’s at stake,” Rick said. “I’m the program director, and when it hits the trade papers that this station ran a fixed contest, it’s also going to say that I’m the one who brought it to the attention of the authorities. Otherwise I’m out of the radio business and there’s precious little else I’m qualified to do.” This was the first time he had bothered to look at it this way and there was more than a little truth in his appraisal. The trade papers would certainly give bigger play to the murder plot if was proved in court, but the rigged contest on Rick’s watch would be in there too, so he actually did need to cover himself.

  “That makes sense,” Joni said. “It’s sorta like if people found out a girl won a scholarship pageant because she curried favor with the judges.” She shook her head. “She’d never qualify for another pageant.”

  “Yeah,” Rick said, thinking back to some of the opportunities Clay talked about when he was a pageant judge. “It’s sorta like that.”

  Joni stood. “Listen, thanks for your help,” she said. “It’s good to know there are still a few honest people out there.” Rick demurred at the comment, since he’d been less than honest with her. Joni looked around the studio for a moment. A look of delight sparkled in her eyes and she said, “Hey, could you play a request for me, while I’m driving home?”

  “Sure. What?”

  “Could you play that Steve Miller song about Billy Joe and Bobby Sue who shot a man while robbin’ his castle. I love that song.”

  Rick found himself comforted knowing that radio still had the power to make people smile that way.

  55.

  After playing Joni’s request, Rick veered off in the direction of Boogie Chillen and the guitar riff that he figured was the jumping off point for more ‘classic rock’ songs than any other. John Lee Hooker ended up with most of the credit but the riff had been around since at least Charlie Patton or Blind Blake and the turn of the twentieth century. Rick started with ZZ Top’s La Grange. At the break two-thirds through the song he segued into Shake Your Hips from Exile On Main Street, then, at the break in that one, Rick went back to the ZZ Top without missing a beat. He came out of that into Canned Heat’s Woodstock Boogie and went on from there.

  The phones had been pretty slow for the past hour but around eleven the request line started blinking. Rick picked up the handset and said, “AOR.”

  “Kitty still needs some love,” Traci said before making the suggestive cat sound again.

  Rick felt a surge of blood and he said, “Hubba hubba. Meet me at my place?”

  “Can’t,” Traci said. “I’m baby sitting.”

  “Okay, how ‘bout I come over there?”

  “Can’t, I’m–”

  “You’re baby sitting, I know, but it’s not like I’m proposing that we do anything in front of the child.”

  “Kitty’s gonna need some love tomorrow night, too.”

  “Yes, but will Kitty be baby sitting?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then it’s a date.” Rick paused before he said, “Is that why you called?”

  “Nope.”

  He waited for her to continue. When she didn’t he said, “Do I have to put on a really long record and come over there and pull this out of you with a pair of needle-nose pliers?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Then what’s it gonna take?”

  “Play me a song.”

  “Name it.”

  “No. You pick one.”

  A record came to mind and he snickered. “You sure?”

  “I’ll call you back after you play it.”

  Rick finished the Boogie Chillen set before playing Traci’s song. Then he cleared his throat, turned on his mike, and said, “Tommy Bolin with the title track from his 1975 album, Teaser. And you know who you are.” The request line started blinking immediately. “Well, the phone lines are lighting up now,” Rick said. “So let’s get back to the music. This next little gem was produced by Jimi Hendrix, though he doesn’t play on it, which is a pure shame. Here’s Cat Mother and the All Night News Boys with Good Old Rock and Roll on WAOR-FM.” He pulled off his head phones and picked up the phone. “AOR.”

  “Bet you think you’re pretty funny,” Traci said.

  “Hey, you told me to pick, so I picked. Now what were you going to tell me?”

  “Would it have killed you to play something romantic?”

  “I’ll do that after you tell me whatever it is.”

  “Okay, you’re gonna love this,” Traci said. “I heard back from Tammy Callaway.”

  “What’d you tell her?”

  “That somebody told me that they overheard Clay telling somebody else about some girl that wanted him to come back to her motel room and pee on her. And she knew exactly what I was talking about.”

  “Get out.”

  “Picture this,” Traci said. “It was that beauty pageant down on the coast, right? All the girls and judges and promoters were havin’ this pre-pageant reception and cocktail party. So, Tammy and this girl named Melinda something or other, Tammy couldn’t remember the girl’s last name, but the two of them were talking to Clay and a couple other men who were going to judge the thing. They were talking about fitness and makeup and Botox and all that kinda stuff when this Melinda girl mentioned a news story she’d heard about how there’s a chemical in urine that doctors said helped reduce wrinkles. Well, Clay just jumped all over that, Tammy said. He wouldn’t shut up makin’ all these dumb comments. He started nudgin’ the other judges and winkin’ at ‘em and sayin’ stuff like how he’d be glad to go on back to Melinda’s room and piss on her if that was the sort of thing she was into. Two hours later Tammy heard him tellin’ the story to
somebody else, just like he does on the tape.”

  “Boy’s got an overactive imagination.”

  “That’d be a charitable way of lookin’ at it, I guess.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “That’s it, except that Tammy and Melinda lost to some girl named Mitzi.”

  “Didn’t say anything about blackmail?”

  “Well, since Clay was makin’ the whole story up, I couldn’t see there was anything to blackmail her with, so I didn’t ask.”

  “Good point,” Rick said. “So where does that leave us?”

  “Leaves us trying to figure out what to do with Bernie and Clay. And leaves you playing me something romantic.”

  “Coming up,” Rick said. “By the way, did you like the Boogie Chillen set?”

  “I did,” Traci said. “But right now I’m more interested in a hoochie coochie man.”

  56.

  Rick decided to make Traci’s the last song of his show. But what would he play? Over the years, Rick had shown a tendency, when smitten, to play fabulous, if sappy, old nuggets like Jim Croce’s I’ll Have To Say I Love You In A Song. Its melody and lyrics had an undeniable romanticism, at least to some ears. But Rick’s experience had taught him that one woman’s romantic was another’s puerile sentimentalism. He knew if he went too sweet, he’d come across as a dewy-eyed schoolboy, not exactly the image he wanted to convey. So he decided to avoid that school of song altogether.

  Next he considered playing something tender but ambiguous. A pretty song with vague lyrics, open to interpretation. Something that wouldn’t make him sound like a stalker if read in open court. Not that such things were likely to happen but, as Rick liked to say, it was a funny world and one just never knew. After thinking on it for a minute, Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s Helplessly Hoping came to mind with its exquisite harmonies, sweet melody, and harmlessly hopeful lyrics. But when he looked at the clock he realized that from where he was, the 2:38 of the CSN would leave him two minutes shy of midnight, which was one of those things he just couldn’t do.