Bill Fitzhugh - Fender Benders (27 page)

“Hey, Bill?”
 
It was
the pedal steel player.
 
“Before we get
started, we got a little something we worked out during the break.
 
Might work
good
with
the song.”

Big Bill looked to Eddie.
 
“It’s your session.
 
Whaddya say?”

Eddie smiled.
 
“I
ain’t in
no
hurry.”

Big Bill held his hands up, surrendering to the
musicians.
 
“Let’s hear it.”

The pedal steel player nodded to the picker and they began
to play.
 
It was just the two
instruments, a pedal steel guitar and a mandolin, their voices combining to
create a third.
 
What they played wasn’t
strictly a melody; it was more of a mood or a setting or an emotion put in
chords.
 
The fiddle player stood by, arms
folded gently over his instrument, nodding his head solemnly as if to say, ‘
Yeah, I’ve felt that way too.
’
 
Megan and Whitney sat forward on the sofa,
listening intently.
 
Franklin
stood there, hands clasped behind his back, wishing Eddie hadn’t cut him out of
the producing credit.
 
The passage lasted
only fifteen or twenty seconds but left everyone marveling.
 
When it ended, you could’ve heard a pin
drop.
 
Porky Vic sat there smiling.

Big Bill broke the silence when he punched the mic
button.
 
“Play that again,” he said as he
hit the ‘record’ button.
 
So they
did.
 
As they approached the end of the
piece, Eddie and the fiddle player made eye contact and joined in with what
used to be the opening parts.
 
The bass
player and drummer fell in a couple of bars later and they did a complete run
through.
 
Eddie sang his heart out.
 
Big Bill sat at the console, riding the gain,
his head tilted back slightly and poised perfectly between the monitors.
 
He closed his eyes and listened.
 
When it was over Porky Vic stopped the tape
machine.
 
Bill hit the mic button
again.
 
He paused, not knowing at first
what to say.
 
“I don’t think we can
improve on that,” he said, finally, “but let’s do another take, just for
grins.”
 
He pointed at the pedal steel
and the fiddle player.
 
“And, at the end,
I want you to come back in with that same thing and we’ll fade it out.”

They did the song two more times, each as affecting as the
one before.
 
When they had the take they
wanted, Eddie went over and shook the pedal steel player’s hand, thanked him
for his contribution and said, half joking, that he might be willing to give up
a quarter of a point of the publishing for the intro.
 
“That’s not necessary,” the slide player
said, though he didn’t mean it.

“All right,” Eddie said quickly.
 
“If you insist.
 
But I’ll mention it in the liner notes.”

No one said another word about what they had just
recorded.
 
It was as if they all knew it
was a monster, but no one wanted to jinx it by saying so.
 
“You wanna take a break or move on?” Big Bill
asked.

“Long as the Spirit’s with us,” Eddie said, “let’s go on and
do ‘Dixie National.’”
 
The players shuffled
through their charts and toyed with the chords for a few minutes, warming
up.
 
‘Dixie National’ was Eddie’s tribute
to the rodeo he used to go see as a kid at the Mississippi Coliseum at the
fairgrounds in Jackson.
 
The song was two parts Chris LeDoux, one part
Charlie Daniels, and just enough Eddie Long to make it his own.

In the control room, Franklin
worked on Whitney.
 
“For example, say you
play a mid-size venue and they want to record your show and pay you five
thousand dollars for the right to sell copies of that performance
in perpetuity
.”
 
He paused, tilting his head the way he
remembered one of his law professors doing.
 
“Would you sign that contract?”

“For five thousand dollars?”
 
Whitney thought about it for a moment.
 
He looked at Megan, then back at Franklin.
 
“Sure,” he shrugged.
 
“I guess.
 
I mean, why not?”
 
Whitney hated
talking about business.
 
He’d come here
to play music, to record, to do his craft.
 
If he’d wanted to talk about contracts, he’d have gone to law school.

Franklin assumed
a fatherly demeanor.
 
“See, that’s why
you need us.
 
I’d never let you sign that
contract.
 
Never.
 
Everybody in this town’ll tell you, I can’t
scratch the words ‘in perpetuity’ out of a contract fast enough.”

“But it’s just one show,” Whitney said.
 
“Five thousand’s good money
to me, especially for one gig.
 
You know what I mean?”
 
He looked
to Megan for her thoughts.
 
She smiled
politely and shrugged as if to say she couldn’t argue.
 
She thought that was nicer than coming out
and just calling him a short-sighted clodhopper.

“Now don’t get me wrong,” Franklin
said, “five thousand’s not bad, but stick with me and Big Bill and you can
probably do better’n that.
 
That’s all
I’m sayin’.”

Whitney nodded thoughtfully, figuring Mr. Peavy was
right.
 
After all, he and Mr. Herron had
been in the business a long time and, by all appearances, were doing well.
 
A guy like Whitney was probably better off
sticking to what he knew and letting the big dogs with the brass collars handle
all that business stuff.

Eddie and the band finished ‘Dixie National’ and started
talking about what to cut next when Big Bill suddenly slapped the arms of his
chair and spun around.
 
“Hey now!
 
I just had
a wild idea,” he announced.
 
“What do you
think about having Eddie record your song?”

A moment passed before Whitney realized Big Bill was talking
to him.
 
“What do you mean?”

“That’s a great idea,” Franklin
said, hands held wide in well-practiced wonder.

Big Bill held his own hands out as though they were a part
of his argument.
 
“We need a demo to take
the song around anyway, right?”
 
He
gestured at the players in the studio.
 
“Long as we got a band, why not kill two birds?”

“It’ll save you some money too,” Franklin
said, nudging Whitney.
 
“Demo session
with a band’ll usually run you five or six grand.
 
This a
good
opportunity.”

Big Bill looked at his watch, then at Whitney.
 
“Whaddya
say,
hoss?
 
We’ll just record it as a demo,
full band, no charge.”

Whitney felt the pressure as they waited for his
decision.
 
He always thought he’d be the
first one to record his song, but maybe he misunderstood the purpose of a
demo.
 
He could ask about it, but he
didn’t want to look stupid in front of all these people.
 
And he sure didn’t want to get anybody mad at
him just when he felt he was getting a foot in the door.
 
He looked around, unsure about what he should
do.

“Whitney?”
 
Big Bill
looked at his watch again.

In the acoustically perfect room, he could hear the watch
ticking.
 
“This would just be a demo,”
Whitney said, tentatively, “so I could still record it, right?”

“Absolutely,” Big Bill assured him.
 
He pointed toward the studio.
 
“Go on in there and play it for ‘em so they
can get a feel for it.”
 
He pushed the
mic button.
 
“Fellas, we’re gonna do
Whitney’s song next.”

“We got charts on it?” the bass player asked.

“Nope, you’ll have to roll your own,” Big Bill said.

A moment later Whitney was in the studio with a borrowed
Martin, playing his song while the musicians charted it for themselves.
 
Whitney sang it a couple of times while Eddie
wrote out the lyrics.
 
It was an elegant
ballad, sweet and aching with a beautiful chorus.
 
The bridge was simple and lovely.
 
The lyrics were straightforward and honest
and conveyed the tender security of true, unconditional love.
 
It timed out at just over three minutes and
left you wanting more.
 
“That’s a
terrific song,” Eddie said.
 
“What’s it
called?”

“Night’s Devotion,” Whitney said.

“That’s nice.
 
I’ll
try not to mess it up too bad.”
 
Eddie
winked at him.

“Thanks,” Whitney said.
 
“I, uh, I appreciate it.”
 
He
didn’t know what else to say.
 
He put the
Martin back in its stand and returned to the control room to watch his song
come to life.
 
He’d never heard anyone
else — let alone an entire band — do one of his songs and he wasn’t sure how
he felt about it.

Eddie and the band ran through it a few times with Big Bill
making suggestions here and there.
 
He
turned to Whitney every time he made a change to the song.
 
“You see why I did that?”
 
Whitney would always nod, even if he didn’t
really understand.
 
But at the moment, he
didn’t care because they were playing his song and, honestly, it sounded better
than it ever had in his head.

Whitney sat back on the sofa and took it all in.
 
Here he was at the home studio of one of Nashville’s
most storied producers.
 
Sitting on one
side of him was his own
manager,
on the other side was
the very attractive girlfriend of the recording artist who was in the studio
recording one of Whitney’s songs.
 
For
the first time since moving to Nashville,
Whitney felt like he belonged.
 
His
elusive dreams seemed to be coming true.
 
He just wished his mama could see him now.

37.

Jimmy got back from Meridian
late that night and went straight to the Dutch Bar and Lounge, an exceptionally
seedy beer joint that served up a good plate of fried pickles and cheap draft
beer.
 
He chose the DB&L not only for
its atmosphere and menu, but also because it was close enough to his apartment
that he could stumble home afterwards if it came to that.
 
And Jimmy was thinking after the day he had,
it just might.

On the upside, he’d gotten the information he wanted from
Oak Pharm, but the deal with Eddie still had him shook up.
 
Cease and desist and restraining orders?
 
What the hell was that all about?
 
Jimmy could think of three possible
explanations, none of them auspicious.
 
The worst case scenario, the one comprised of both personal and
professional humiliation, was that Eddie was now sleeping with Megan.
 
In that case Eddie would likely be unable to
visualize himself working side-by-side with the guy from whom he stole the
girl.
 
But that raised other
questions.
 
Had Eddie stolen Megan or had
she gone after him?
 
Jimmy knew Megan
better than he knew Eddie, and he had to admit the latter was entirely
possible.

As Jimmy sucked down a second draft and ordered a third, it
occurred to him that he might be jumping the gun.
 
It was possible Eddie and Megan hadn’t even
been in contact with each other.
 
It
could be that Big Bill Herron had convinced Eddie that Jimmy was simply the
wrong guy to write the book.
 
There were
certainly other writers — proven biographers, for example — with whom
publishers would rather be in business.
 
Given Eddie’s ambitions, it was easy to imagine him buying that argument.
 
The final possibility was that Eddie had
never even mentioned the book idea and that Big Bill was simply caught off
guard by Jimmy’s call.
 
In that case his
threats might have been a knee-jerk reaction to buy some time while he checked
with his client or tried to find a way to work it more to his advantage.
 
So Jimmy didn’t know if Eddie had really
betrayed him or if his manager was just being a dickhead.
 
Worse, the only way he could find out for
sure was by going to Nashville,
finding Eddie, and asking him.
 
And right
now he didn’t have the time for that.

There was only one thing that didn’t pass the sniff test no
matter which way Jimmy approached it.
 
That Eddie hadn’t called after getting his unlisted number told Jimmy
where he stood more than anything else, just as it did with Megan.
 
With that in mind, Jimmy finished his third
beer and fried pickles and headed home.

He lived in a two bedroom unit at the River Wood Oaks
Townhouses, one of a hundred unimaginative apartment complexes in Jackson
with the sorts of names that made you expect better construction than you
got.
 
The wafer thin walls were actually
a convenience inasmuch as they allowed Jimmy to hear, in exquisite detail, the
vocal sex life of his next door neighbors, which in turn allowed Jimmy to
masturbate without having to overuse his limited store of sexual memories.

Perhaps he’d get to that later, he thought, but right now
Jimmy was more interested in the information he’d picked up about the poisoned
Dr. Porter’s Headache Powder.
 
It turned
out that all of the tainted boxes had come from a single lot shipped to a store
in Little Rock, Arkansas
eight months earlier.
 
The killer
apparently bought several boxes from that lot, added the poison, resealed the
packages,
then
put them on store shelves in at least
three southern states.
 
So far, the
police had found nothing to connect the victims other than sodium fluoroacetate
and Dr. Porter’s.
 
No debt problems, no
common lovers, nothing.

The only death Jimmy and the feds didn’t know about was Hoke
Paley’s in Lee County, Alabama.
 
Sheriff
Herndon had never seen the Federal Crime Information bulletin about the other
poisoning deaths and besides, he already had two good suspects in the crime.
 
So he didn’t feel the need to see if other,
similar, crimes had been committed anywhere else.