Pinball (7 page)

“Meaning?” Domostroy asked.

“That he is smart!” She touched her head with a forefinger. “That if you listen to Goddard real close, you can tell he’s gone to a good music school. Not at all like those guys!” she said, gesturing with her head at the band.

Two young men from the band came over to tell her they were about to leave, and Angel got up to go. As she thanked Domostroy for the drinks, she gave his face and hands a last hard look. “Your skin’s getting a bit dry,” she said. “You should use a moisturizer. Did you know that pure petroleum jelly is best?” She grinned. “For the hands, glycerin and oxide are also okay. Or, if you want to be fancy, buy yourself some preparations with stearic acid, propylene glycol, glycerol stearates, or purcellin oil.” She obviously enjoyed showing off her professional knowledge. “Purcellin oil is really super. It comes from the glands of ducks and geese. It’s the stuff that makes water roll off a duck’s back!” With that, she left to join her departing friends.

By now, Domostroy was convinced that any attempt to trace Goddard through music societies, business concerns, or government channels would be useless. Even with Andrea’s help he had neither the means nor the energy to undertake that sort of investigation; furthermore, he had no reason to believe he would succeed where so many others had failed.

There had to be some path that would lead to Goddard. But which one?

Domostroy began listening to Goddard’s music, hour after hour, with his eyes closed. The melodic shape was always original: the tempos created an exciting pulse; the singer’s voice remained strong and vibrant, with good diction and coloration; and the lyrics, now turbulent, now tender, seldom robbed the music of its own drama.

After a while Domostroy began to suspect that Goddard cleverly mixed the sounds of live instruments with a synthesizer, which, by electronically storing the sounds of several instruments, allowed him, at a touch of the keyboard, to accompany himself with a number of instruments or even an entire band. He noticed that only once had Goddard ever recorded music written by anyone else—the two songs in Spanish that Angel had mentioned—and even then he had tailored the songs radically to match the famous Goddard sound. In the past, both of these selections had been performed time and time again by Latin singers, so if Goddard had gone to the trouble of rearranging, translating, and recording them, these simple, folk songs must have been important to him. But nothing on his other records indicated any Latin influence. Had he, perhaps, in his travels, heard the tunes in Mexican nightclubs or at Latin music festivals and liked them enough to commit his time, talent, and effort to popularizing them in the States? Who could tell? There could have been a dozen other reasons equally as plausible.

Some days after his meeting with Nash, Domostroy went to see Samuel Scales in the offices of Mahler, Strauss, Handel, and Penderecki, a large law firm representing many clients in the field of the arts, and principally musicians. A few years before, Scales had negotiated Domostroy’s contract with Etude Classics, and at that time the two men had often seen each other socially. Scales’s firm—until recently housed in an East Side brownstone—reflected perfectly the mushrooming of the entertainment industry in America, for it now occupied
six
floors of the Hammer-klavier Building, one of the tallest futuristic additions to the Manhattan skyline.

Domostroy shared the waiting room with a still glamorous aging movie star and a couple of black rock musicians. As he followed the receptionist to Scales’s office, he passed rows of desks and dozens of cubicles buzzing with the noise of electric typewriters, telexes, telephones, and photocopying machines. Hie sight of so many secretaries working with the newest electronic word processors surprised him, and he suddenly felt intimidated as well as embarrassed at the thought of why he was there.

Scales stood up behind his large rosewood desk, which was centered in front of a wall-sized window fifty floors above Madison Avenue. Deeply tanned, his silvery hair combed back, his forehead and cheeks smoothed out by plastic surgery, Scales looked like a middle-aged Beverly Hills playboy. He waved Domostroy in. “Well! I’m surprised to see you looking so fit,” he joked, “after all the terrible things I’ve been hearing about you.”

“What terrible things?” asked Domostroy, forcing a big smile.

“Gypsy living. Moonlighting in wild places. Mickey-Mousing.” He laughed and motioned for them to sit down. “True or false?”

“True,” said Domostroy, sitting. “They keep me fit.”

Scales pushed some papers aside and leaned forward on the desk. “What can I do for you, Domo?” he asked. “Got a new masterpiece? Another
Octaves,
by any chance?”

“Not quite. I am working on something—with another person,” said Domostroy, mustering courage.

“Be careful! I still recall those press hatchet jobs about your ‘secret’ collaborators and what their headlines did to your reputation. But this time is it really a musical collaboration?” Scales asked with interest.

“Only of sorts. And no more than were all those others. But this time I need advice. It won’t take long at all,” he said, recalling Scales’s extravagantly high fees in bygone days.

“I’m all ears,” said Scales.

“Well … my partner and I are wondering … what are the chances of our tracking down Goddard.”

Scales raised his eyebrows. “Goddard?
The
Goddard?”

“Yes “

“What for?”

“For a good reason, believe me,” said Domostroy.

“Like what? Murder? Can you prove Goddard killed someone?” asked Scales a bit impatiently.

“No, but—”

“Because if you can’t, I’d advise you not to waste your time.” He paused and reflected. “In fact, even if you could prove such a thing, finding him still wouldn’t be easy. I once handled a rather famous case involving a prisoner at Leavenworth.” He paused, then opened up to tell Domostroy yet another favorite story. “This man, starting when he was twelve, had spent some twenty-five years in the clink for various crimes, including killing a fellow prisoner and badly wounding another. While he was in prison, invisible to the world, he wrote country and western music and lyrics and he sent the stuff to some music luminaries on the outside. They were convinced that they’d discovered a genius, and they hired me to help them obtain the man’s parole. So at the age of thirty-seven he arrived in Nashville and was welcomed by the country and western establishment as if he were a Johnny Cash clone.

“Even though his music—at best, mediocre—was gentle
his lyrics were not. They expressed contempt for the faceless masses whom he saw as ignorant, cynical and basically evil. The fellow believed that to be a man, you must, to save face, kill anyone who threatens you with force. But once his arrival turned into a rags-to-riches publicity event, everyone hoped that the man to whom violence was music would now be just a music man, a noble savage, a gentle prisoner of the keyboard, with a musical talent that would free his soul. Needless to say, as if on command, in spite of his hateful lyrics, his music received some of the most laudatory front-page reviews country and western had ever seen and—visible as hell—our genius was launched, like no other, into a musical career. However …” Scales slumped back in his chair.

“However,” he went on, “barely two weeks later, he was in a coffee shop, where he asked to use the washroom. The counter man, a twenty-two-year-old musician—a recently married gentle fellow who worked there part-time—told him that the place didn’t have a public toilet. Actually, it didn’t, but our noble savage chose not to believe the guy, and—possibly to save face in front of two young women who were with him—he knifed the young man to death for lying to him. Then he vanished. He managed to stay clear of the police, write many more songs, and, possibly in collusion with some of his past sponsors, have them published under another name, and sung by some of our best country and western stars, before tipping off the newspapers to who he was. He’s still writing, as far as I know, still at large and invisible again. Nobody has any idea what he looks like these days, whether he has killed anyone else, or who—if anyone—is helping him out. And that man is a publicized murderer! If he can hide and write his music in secret, think of what Goddard, with Nokturn Records behind him, could get away with!” Scales looked sadly up at Domostroy.

“Do you then think looking for Goddard would be a complete waste?” Domostroy asked.

“In my opinion, it would,” Scales said. “At least it’s been a complete waste for, I guess, quite a few thousand people so far.”

“You mean I don’t have the smallest chance of finding him?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“What about Nokturn Records? Surely they deal with him, don’t they? How? How does he get his music to them?”

“By mail probably. From their very first press conference on Goddard, Nokturn has stuck to the same story: they say that no one in the company has ever met Goddard in person and that no one there knows who or where he is. Therefore, Nokturn could not divulge his secret even if they wanted to.”

“Do you believe them?” asked Domostroy.

“Do I have any proof that they are lying?”

“But what about the government?’ Domostroy was insistent. “Someone in the government must know who Goddard is.”

“C’mon, Domo,” said Scales gruffly. “What does the government care? Goddard is a rock singer, not the head of a foreign state in disguise or a Soviet or CIA master spy on the loose!”

“But Goddard gets money from Nokturn, doesn’t he? What about taxes? Doesn’t the government go after his taxes? They certainly went after mine—checking my returns year after year—when I used to compose and record!” Domostroy was feeling more and more frustrated.

“I know they did,” said Scales softly. “I represented you then.” He straightened in his chair. “As I recall,” he went on with exaggerated calm, “about a year after Goddard’s first big album came out and the first big money started rolling in, a congressional inquiry prompted the IRS to do a scrupulous audit of all of Nokturn’s dealings with Goddard. The IRS found nothing illegal in Nokturn’s handling of their Goddard business. On the contrary, as Oscar Blaystone, Nokturn’s president, revealed, the company paid all Goddard’s royalties to a Swiss bank’s numbered account, but only after all New York state and city taxes and all federal taxes had been withheld. That meant, as an agent of the IRS publicly pointed out, that by remaining incognito, Goddard was voluntarily waiving massive
tax deductions he would be entitled to under U.S. tax law as a self-employed artist.” He paused. “It also means that as long as his income is properly taxed to the fullest, Goddard is free of any hassles with revenue agents. And given the extraordinary secrecy the Swiss guarantee people with really big accounts—can you imagine how big Goddard’s account must be!—he can move money from there with the greatest ease to accounts in his own name, or in the name of John Doe, anywhere in the world, without fear of discovery. What else do you want to know, Domo?” he asked, glancing at his desk calendar.

“Nothing. I guess you’ve said it all.” Domostroy got up. “Do you have any advice for me?” he asked as Scales escorted him to the door.

“Write music and don’t make new headlines. They don’t do you any good,” said Scales, shaking his hand. “I mean that. Besides, isn’t Etude still your publisher?”

“Yes,” said Domostroy. “They keep my records in print.”

“Well, Etude records are distributed by Nokturn. So if you write some more music, you’ll be in the same boat as Goddard! What better way to find him?”

“But how will I know the other guy in the boat is Goddard?” asked Domostroy.

“You won’t. And that’s the catch,” said Scales, laughing as he closed the door.

Listening to Goddard’s music and speculating about his own fate, Domostroy recalled his own better days, when he traveled to give a concert or plug his latest release on a publicity tour. All during the time when his records were selling and his music was at its peak of popularity, he often appeared on TV and radio talk shows and music programs across the country. His fan mail then was so voluminous that Etude would ship to him only the cream of the fan letters, for he could never have read them all. One of the secretaries at Etude Classics did the sorting out, sending him by express mail only letters from
critics, serious listeners, and music students. The straight-into-the-wastebasket stuff, comprised largely of naive assurances of adoration, was answered by the secretary herself with the usual form letter.