As She Rides By (Vic Daniel Series)

by David Pierce

  "You got it," he said. "Now don't worry, try and relax, they'll be right here."

  "Not me," I said, "him," but the guy was already on the phone.

  The kid was still alive when the reinforcements showed up, but his pulse was down to about half strength. As long as he was still breathing, I didn't figure mouth to mouth would help, so I just kind of held him against me and waited. Not long, either, maybe six or seven minutes was all.

  "Shit," one of the paras who was lifting him onto the gurney said. "Must weigh all of a hundred pounds soaking wet, poor bastard."

  "Yeah," I said. Then I said my piece to a patrol cop, and so did the beard, and off everyone went again.

  "That's all, folks," the cop said out of the car window as he took off to a couple of rubberneckers who had gathered.

  "Did you have to bring the cops into it?" the beard asked through the window, frowning at me.

  "If I hadn't, someone along the line would have," I said.

  "Yeah, still," he said.

  "Yeah, nothing," I said. "Maybe you're a tourist, maybe that's it, maybe you don't know most ambulances out here won't take you unless you got cash up front or some valid plastic or Blue Cross even if you're bleeding to death. Figure that kid had any of the above?"

  He shrugged.

  "With the cops on the scene," I said, brushing some dried leaves off my chinos, "they can make 'em take him. Or we could have flipped for it, it's only forty or fifty bucks."

  "All right, all right," he said. "So I am a tourist. So I do come from somewhere halfway civilized."

  "That's no way to talk about South Miami," I said. "Whatever will the city fathers think?" He grinned, gave me a mock salute, and closed the window. I continued up the path, found the right office number, and went in. A stunning redhead in a halter top, with headphones on, was typing away furiously but soundlessly on an electric typewriter almost as big as my car. She arched one perfect eyebrow in my direction.

  "Dick Distler," I mouthed. "Appointment with."

  She pressed a button on her desk, then told me to go down the hall to the first door on the left. I promptly did so.

  Dick Distler was a little bald bundle of sizzling energy. He was also twenty years too old for his wardrobe, which was yellow slacks, lime-green collarless shirt open down to his knees, no socks, and suede, pump-up Reeboks. Dick Distler, however, it became instantly clear, was one smart cookie, and one tough cookie, too, tougher even than those dry, chewy oatmeal ones a certain execrable lady poet of my acquaintance once proudly presented to me in a desperate attempt to butter me up for something. She should have saved the butter for the cookies.

  The first thing Dick did was to answer a question I hadn't even asked yet. "You'll wanna know," he said, "how come we're still drinkin' buddies when I was their manager and it was their management, among a long, long list, that ripped the boys off. Right?" He hopped up onto his desk and began swinging his legs busily.

  I took a closer look at the desk. It reminded me of my pal John D.'s desk. He owned and ran the Valley Bowl, which wasn't that far from where I lived, and he'd rescued some slats when he'd had a couple of his lanes resurfaced and built himself a nifty piece of furniture with them. Dick's desk looked just like half a shuffleboard table, and when I took a closer look, I saw that's exactly what it was. To make it easier to work at, one of the boards that ran along the sides to prevent the puck from shooting off into space had been removed.

  Was I jealous?

  Don't be childish.

  I was sitting in an old barber chair facing him. A gorgeous old thirties Art Deco chair, with green and orange tinted leather and built-in ashtrays. Was I jealous? Extremely, and I am the first to admit it. I must say, otherwise his office was a surprise—there wasn't one photo of him posed with clients or other celebrities and then lovingly signed, as is the show business norm, from my experience. I'd noticed the OD'd kid's fingertips were callused in the way that all guitar players' digits get after a while; it seemed unlikely he'd wind up smiling down from some mogul's wall. Him and a million others. Know what the cops had found when they went through the pockets of his fake army surplus pants? A couple of guitar picks and a wad of Monopoly money.

  "So what are you lookin' at?" Dick said then.

  "Bare walls," I said.

  He laughed. "It was my first wife's idea. I forget her name. I think it ended with an 'i,' so it could have been Bambi or Bobbi. She said it was tacky, a whole lotta glossies, she said it made the place look like a second-rate delicatessen; she said what I should do is like right before a meeting I should put up just one photo of the guy I got the meeting with. That way I don't look tacky and he thinks I think he's my main man."

  I laughed.

  "What the hell," he said, waving one hand. "So what I was saying was, how come? How come is, I was their manager too late in the game, it was all over pretty much by then, they were already too deep in the doodly squat, they'd signed everything but the Declaration of Independence by then, the dummies. We did what we could, me and the present incumbent next door there"—he gestured with his thumb to the door that led to his wife's office—"but she'll give you the details on that if you're interested and if she hasn't finished that giant thermos of martinis she brings to the office every day in a brown bag that she thinks I think is cranapple juice. What you want from me, if I heard you right this a.m. when you called, is anything I know about the way Jonesy, pres and sole owner of Western Records, Inc., does business."

  "You'd make an old man very happy if you did," I said, "and also help him earn a few measly bucks."

  "Speakin' of which," he said, "bucks he's got. Skid Row Annie in there can probably find out how many, if she don't know already; she sure knows how many I've got, down to six decimals."

  "These might help," I said, hefting the manila folder. "Lots of bank statements and what have you in here, I took a peek earlier."

  "So Annie'll check," he said. "Big deal. Think Jonesy's gonna give you some tarted-up accounts for Annie to run her beady eyes over? Forget it. As for me, I never heard one word that Jonesy was less than ultra straight, and you can't say that about too many guys in this rotten business."

  "Or any other," I said.

  He shrugged. "Know what? He don't even send out large, well-attired dudes with pockets of C-notes and a plenteous supply of coke to all the radio stations. He doesn't try to bribe DJs and programmers either directly or with expensive Christmas presents; forget about two-hundred-buck call girls stoppin' by their hotel rooms, hell, he doesn't even try and rig the charts, and I don't mean the weather charts, neither. Heavens to Betsy, what secrets is little moi disclosing! What you must think of us!"

  I grinned, found the right control, and tipped my chair back a little further. "Just out of curiosity," I said, "how do you rig a chart, anyway?"

  "Listen," he said, "airplay equals singles chart position which equals album sales, anything hard about that? The thing is, how do you get airplay? Pluggers can get you some, most you get from checkin' out what singles are moving in the record stores. If it's movin', it gets played. Now, although it's supposed to be this great secret, every record company in the world has a list of what outlets are on the checklist types like Gallup use to compile their charts. So the record company either pays the manager of one of these retail outlets—stores to you—to rig his daily totals in their favor, or how about sending out a fast-movin' team of buyers to hit all the stores in the list. In England it's easier, you got fewer stores to cover, shit, for a few grand your record starts burning up the sales charts, so it pops up on the singles chart, so it gets played, and around and around we go. Last I heard, over there weekly sales of twenty-five hundred or so are enough to break into the Top 75 and maybe seven to eight thousand to break the Top 40, which automaticaly gets you onto most of the important play lists. Startin' to get the picture?" He drummed his feet noisily against one of the table legs.

  I nodded.

  "Know what the record industry sales were
last year?"

  I shook my head.

  "Six point three billion. That's up from 277 million in '55. So you can imagine what goes on with that kind of money at stake. Alan Freed, remember him?"

  I nodded.

  "Rumors of payola were rife! Scandals emerged! He disappeared. That was back in '60. Payola in one form or another to get airtime never went away. Ever hear of the Network?"

  I shook my head.

  "Late seventies," he said. "Bunch of independent pluggers got together, backed by some of the major record companies. Five years later they were working on a budget upwards of fifty million dollars a year, and the squeeze was on. No one could buck 'em; Warner's and CBS tried; they couldn't even get their major artists played on Radio Greenland." He shook his head, then gave his fingernails a close inspection.

  "So what happened?"

  "I think it was NBC," he said, "finally blew the whistle on 'em. Said the Network was tied up with organized crime and that they could prove it. Adios, Network."

  "But our boy Jonesy was never involved." I said. "According to you."

  "According to everyone," Dick said. "Now why don't 'cha take a deep breath and call on the little woman, she'll fill you in on the rest. It's time for my nap."

  "Sure, sure," I said, getting to my feet. "Guy like you probably needs twenty hours of sleep a day, at least."

  "Through there," he said. "Knock and enter. If she's passed out, I don't wanna know about it." He hopped down, shook my hand vigorously, then gave me a push toward the door.

  "I was wondering," I said, "what happened to the other half of the shuffleboard?"

  "Billi," he said, "or it might have been Bunni even, was a firm believer in this state's community property law, which, as you probably know, is half. You want it, you saw it, I told her. So she did. First honest job of work she did in the five years we were married."

  "Lucky you didn't have a cat," I said.

  "You're tellin' me," he said. "With my luck, I'd of gotten the half that didn't eat Whiskas."

  I grinned, knocked on Annie's door, and entered. Annie was a deeply tanned woman a good foot taller than her husband; she was working away on a PC with one hand and talking on the phone with the other.

  "Down, big boy, down," she said as soon as I'd entered, gesturing with her chin to a chair opposite her. Down I sat, like a good big boy. I looked around; her walls, too, were as blank as a zombie's eyeballs, except for one old-fashioned needlepoint hanging that said, "Please Be Brief; I've Got Diarrhea."

  When she was done shouting down the line at some hapless A&R man, whatever that was, she slammed the receiver down, peered at the computer screen, scowled, looked up at me through scraggly gray bangs, then said, "Want a drink, shorty?"

  I demurred politely, suggesting it might be a little early in the day for me, thanks.

  She snorted loudly, and poured herself out a large tumblerful of liquid from one of those huge thermoses that even have a spout on them. She took a long swig, then smacked her orange-lipsticked lips appreciatively.

  "So what did Einstein in there tell you was in this, anyway, lab alcohol?"

  "Martinis," I said.

  "Don't I wish," she said. "I haven't had a drink of anything stronger than gripewater since 1976. Hi. I'm Annie."

  "Hi. I'm V. for Victor Daniel. What's gripewater?"

  "Where you been?" Annie said. "It's something they give to kids in Somerset. To stop them griping, I guess."

  "Oh," I said.

  "What the hell," she said, running a hand with four-inch, frosted-pink nails through her tangled mop. "Poor old fart. Let him have his fun, says I, it's about the only fun he gets these days. And what have you got there clutched so firmly to your manly bosom, yesterday's lunch?"

  "From Jonesy to me to you," I said, handing over the well-stuffed folder.

  "Be right with you," she said, pulling down a pair of rhinestone-studded harlequin glasses from atop her head. She opened the folder, licked a thumb, leafed through the contents like a bank teller counting a stack of greenbacks, selected one, and rapidly ran her eyes over it. After fifteen seconds or so she threw it in my general direction, and started on another form or contract or whatever it was. I looked at the one she was done with.

  "AGAC/the songwriters' guild, POPULAR SONGWRITER'S CONTRACT," it said at the top. Then it got complicated, as if the normally unintelligible legalese doublespeak had been translated into Urdu, then back into legalese again. I could read the figures, though, and noted such tidbits as the copyright ran for thirty-five years, the composers got five cents for each pianoforte copy sold, fifty percent of what the publisher collected from electrical transcription, which I took to mean recording, and two cents for a local radio station performance.

  "Er," I said. "Sorry to interrupt, but what's a publisher to do, if anything?"

  "Advances you as little money as possible hoping you're going to make him a million," Annie said without looking up. She tossed another sheet of paper my way.

  "How?"

  She sighed, and started on another lengthy document. "For his advance he gets a piece of your action."

  "How big?"

  She sighed again. "Very briefly," she said. "Say you write a song." She peered up at me. "Unlikely, in your case, but let's pretend. Miraculously, it gets recorded. Equally miraculously, it gets airtime. Beyond all hope or reason, you even manage to sell a few platters. From this, you make money. A few pennies from each radio play. A few bucks from a TV play. Maybe a quarter from each record sold. Sell the rights to the movies or some soap company and you make a lot of money. Then, being a paid-up member in either ASCAP or BMI, which are nonprofit collection agencies that monitor all radio stations and TV channels and the like to make sure their members get paid every time one of their songs is played, you automatically share in some other goodies. Muzak pays a yearly fee. So do airlines. So do roller-skating rinks. So does anyone with a license to play music in a public place. Into the kitty they go. Take jukeboxes."

  "You take them," I said. "Unless they're playing 'Sophisticated Lady.' Or maybe the Andrews Sisters."

  "OK, forget jukeboxes," she said, running one finger rapidly down a long list of sums. "Song books. Sheet music. Money can be made, my large friend."

  "So I've just been hearing."

  "Half of all income your masterpiece earns is yours, by law. The other half, called the Publishing, can be split up, and usually is, between you and the aforementioned publisher who has advanced you some pathetic sum. The split could be fifty/fifty, or seventy-five/twenty-five in either side's favor, or whatever. If, staggeringly, some megastar wants to record your masterpiece, he, she, it, or the manager thereof, will want to get his hands on as much of that publishing fifty percent as he can; and you, being I hope, no fool, will let him have it, all of it, legal or not, if necessary, because you are going to make enough anyway. Here ends the first, and last, lesson."

  "Thank you very much, m'am," I said humbly. "That clears that up."

  "As for this junk," she said, waving a dismissive hand, "all it tells me is exactly what I would have expected it to, at first glance, and I bet after a month's glance, too. Only noticeable thing is, whenever possible, Jonesy's given the artist the break; he must be nuts." She gathered up the papers, stacked them neatly, and tucked them back in their folder. "So if you're looking for evidence to have Jonesy up for grand larceny in this bunch, forget it."

  "Exactly what your dear hubby said," I said. "So you don't think getting some hotshot CPA to look them over would help?"

  "Darling, I am a hotshot CPA," Annie said sweetly. "Among other things, like a deadly poker player, a devoted housewife and mother of two, and a part-time breeder of pedigree huskies."

  "No kidding?" I said, getting to my feet. "I've got a dog, a beauty; I think he's part husky."

  "What part?" Annie asked, pouring herself out some more vitamins.

  "His voice," I said. And with that, I gathered up my belongings, thanked Annie, and took my leav
e.

  Chapter Four

  There'll be a beautiful, bored, blond gringa who's lookin' for a change of pace,

  And she'll say, "Vamos, amigos!" and they'll all drive away.

  J UST LIKE KING and I did; him standing up with his chin on my shoulder, me figuring I'd got pretty much what I'd expected out of the Dick Distlers, which is to say nada, except I now knew more or less what publishing was. What more I could do to establish that Jonesy was a fully paid-up member in the angel of the month club, I did not know. Check out his thirty-six-track studio, maybe, just to show willingness. And maybe his warehouse and shipping setup, if he had one. Talk to someone or members of some group he'd already recorded, that I could do. Check with ASCAP and BMI to see if they'd ever listed him as a type to be avoided due to his reluctance to pay his debts or his habit of booking his prettier clients, especially all-girl dance acts, into unsavory night spots in the Middle East, if not beyond, from whence no all-girl dance act ever returned still retaining that first blush of youth. I knew BMI, anyway, had such a shit list, I'd seen it up at Rickie's in their annual, after a list of members who had money owed to them by various agencies, and before the list of those members recently deceased. I'd known it was a long shot but I'd checked just in case—my name was on none of the lists.

  The nerve of that woman, declaring it was unlikely that I could ever write a song. How hard could it be, anyway? I resolved right then, while I was waiting for the light at the corner of Sunset and Western to change, that I would begin one that very eve. So it took a couple of hours, so what.

  Then I'd slip it casually to Tom 'n' Jerry, who'd go wild about it, they'd put a few simple chords to it, then I'd sit back and just wait for the heavy bread to roll in. A cinch; I was surprised I'd never thought of it before. Let's see . . . what rhymes with bartender . . . car fender, maybe . . . brilliant, Daniel.

  Back at the office, I parked right in front, walked the dog, then went to church. A Catholic church. There were two in my immediate neighborhood, I knew, because Mrs. Morales had once so told me. The beauteous Señora Morales owned and ran the taco/burger joint three stores up from me, and a while back when I was looking for the nearest Catholic church I'd asked her as (a) I'd suspected she was a Catholic as she came from Mexico and always wore a gold cross around her neck, and (b) I knew she lived nearby because I'd once given her daughter a ride home. She had informed me that there was one around the corner more or less, for Anglos, which I'd wound up visiting, and one a few blocks down Victory where all the Latinos and Latinas went, Saint Barnabas.