Tough Baby (Martin Fender Novel) (18 page)

He’d already let me know what a wonderful favor it was he’d done me, considering the fact that it was the weekend. Luckily, his administrative assistant was down at his office pulling phone numbers out of his address book for him when I’d called him.

“I just find it strange,” I said, “that a girl comes here from LA, a girl who was trying to get a job at a record company, and she asks a lot of questions about a guy that you want to give a hundred thousand dollars to for a record label, and then someone tries to kill her, and you.”

His face turned red. It clashed with his purple shirt. “I don’t know what you’re implying,” he said.

“Cool it,” I said. “I’m not sure either. But like someone said, I try especially hard when I don’t know what I’m doing.”

I pushed my chair back and took in the view again. It was too peaceful outside, too subdued inside. Carson Block was waving to the waitress with IMF Records’ platinum American Express card. It was time to stir things up.

“Hey, Carson, why don’t you use the Visa card you used for Retha Thomas’s room at La Quinta? Or is it maxed out?”

The waitress had arrived and was reaching for the American Express card. Carson snatched it back and said, “Would you like something? A beer maybe?”

&&&

The motel manager had been quite helpful. I chalked up part of my success in the matter to my experience at the collection agency. People often think they can get away with anything. They get a great idea, they make plans, they forget about the paper trail. Retha Thomas’s motel room was paid for by Carson Block’s Visa card, as was her rental car. One day last week, she’d had a visitor. This visitor had ordered drinks and paid for them with a MasterCard. The MasterCard was in the name of one B. Q. Torres. Either that night or soon after, she’d had a visitor whose description fit Barbra Quiero to a T. I was anxious to talk to the incommunicado Detective Watson about these facts. But first, I had a few bones to pick with Carson Block.

“I don’t know this other girl you’re talking about,” Carson said, sipping his beer, swallowing with difficulty. “And I don’t know how this could be related to what happened to Retha Thomas.”

“Retha wanted a job. You liked her but you didn’t have a position for her. You led her on. You asked her how she’d like

an expenses-paid trip to a rocking little burg on the Colorado River. All she had to do was find out just how deeply Vick Travis was connected to Bingo Torres. Am I right so far?”

“Look, Martin, I brought this deal to the company, so my butt was in a sling. The deal had gone too far to pull out when I heard about Vick being possibly tainted with this payola thing. I don’t have to tell you . . .”

“You’d lose your job,” I said. “But you didn’t want to lose the deal either. That’s why you showed a little initiative.”

He nodded, chewing one side of his lower lip.

“What did she find out?” I asked.

He palmed the beer glass with his hands, speaking quietly. “She had the whole picture Wednesday of last week when she called me. It didn’t sound like much of a downside. Bingo paid for a few recording sessions for Vick’s artists, using the name he used to perform under, Danny Cortez. So what? We’re talking small change stuff here, Martin, and the way I understand it, other than these deals, Vick hasn’t been closely tied with Bingo for a long time, not since the ’60s.”

“When was the last time you saw Retha Thomas?”

“In a bar in Hollywood, about three weeks ago. I asked her if she was interested in playing detective for me, and she was. You know the rest.”

“Do I?”

He chewed his lip, somewhat forcefully this time, and his eyes widened. I nearly laughed. “If you think I’d try to kill somebody just to cover my tracks on a puny little record deal. . .”

“So puny that you hire an amateur private detective? So puny that you fly here in person to deliver a check for a hundred thousand dollars?”

He rolled his eyes and waved for the check again. I 'settled back in my seat and thought about how much I disliked him. He cleared his throat and adjusted his shoulders under the flimsy jacket.

“Look, I know it seems awfully sleazy. This job, you know, it isn’t always easy, and it isn’t all fun and nice to look at from the inside, either. But believe me, I’m a fan. That’s why I do it. I’m not in this to hang around with a bunch of suits. Accountants, lawyers, con artists, even amateur detectives. Sometimes you have to wade through a lot of sleazy bullshit or nobody would ever hear the music. And that’d be a shame.”

“Speaking of lawyers,” I said, “might the friendly legal staff at IMF Records come to Bingo’s rescue, if it would be to everybody’s benefit?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

I was glad he didn’t say yes, and didn’t say no. It would have been out of character.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I got a handful of quarters at the front desk and took them to the pay phone to try out an idea I had. I checked my watch. It was eleven. That made it nine on the West Coast. I got Retha Thomas’s credit record printout from my jacket and called her bank in LA. I told the girl in the accounts department that I was calling from Lone Star Detectives and Collection Agency and that it was kind of important.

I gave her Retha Thomas’s account number and she looked it up. Was there any unusual activity? I asked. She hummed while she looked it over. Her humming did nothing to soothe the questions that buzzed in my brain. Retha was done with her fact-finding mission Wednesday of last week, half a week before I got back to town. Why did she stick around? Was someone else paying her, too?

“No, not really,” said the clerk. “In fact, the only activity over the last three weeks are these two deposits, both last week. One Friday, for eight hundred dollars, and then Wednesday, for five hundred.”

“How were they made?” I asked.

“They were deposited in an automatic teller machine in Austin,” she said. “How’s the weather down there? Hot, I’ll bet.”

“You can fry an egg on the sidewalk,” I said. It was a lie. It never gets that hot anywhere where they have sidewalks. And besides, I was feeling a distinct chill.

&&&

“How’d you find me?” she asked. She was just out of the shower, in a white terry-cloth bathrobe. Tendrils of damp, just- toweled-off hair stuck up more than ever on top, and a few curved in toward her face like long thorns. We were on the fourth floor of the Radisson, a downtown glass pyramid that was a sort of skeletal ice palace version of the Hyatt’s traditional atrium design.

“It just took a few quarters, Barbra,” I said.

“Glad to see you finally made it out of bed.” She sat down by the window, cracked the curtain, peeked out, then let it fall shut.

“I got your message.”

“Did you? You don’t care. I can see you don’t really give a damn about finding out what happened to Retha. You spend all day in bed with that bimbo and the rest of the time you probably hang around with that tubby pervert and his Igor.”

I took a step back. “That girl is not a bimbo, and I’m getting a little bit weary of this confrontational relationship of ours. I still get the distinct impression that you’d like to hold me responsible for what happened to Retha.”

She gulped hard and looked away. Being wet and without makeup took away some of her hard edges. She had a sort of raw, benignly foreign look to her, as opposed to the hard, exotic impression she gave off fully coiffed and polished. In fact, she reminded me a little of some of the lighter-skinned Mayan women I’d seen the last time I’d been in Mexico. I felt an urge to ask where her family was from, and I wondered what she looked like when she was a little girl, where she went to school. But I swallowed those curiosities, chalking them up to the weird chemistry of our personalities, the close quarters, and her being in a damp bathrobe.

“Look,” I said. “Retha was here on behalf of IMF Records to check out Vick Travis’s ties to Bingo Torres, a South Texas record promoter who’s hip deep in a payola scandal that would have queered the record deal that went down with IMF yesterday. I found out that Retha wired thirteen hundred dollars cash to her bank account back home. That means something, although I’m not sure what.”

Her eyes flashed as she looked up at me, irritated. “She doesn’t know a soul in town yet she’s able to wire thirteen hundred dollars cash home and you say you don’t know what it means? It means someone here was giving her money, chicken dick. That fat son of a bitch that you’ve been working for is probably the guy. She probably decided to use what she had on him, he got tired of paying her off and had her killed. Maybe you were in on it.”

“Maybe you were in on it,” I snapped. “Is that why you were here last week?”

She drew the folds of the robe in closer and shook her head. “Oh God, no, Martin. She was my
friend,
for chrissake. She called me last week and she sounded funny. I knew she was up to something and she didn’t know what she was doing. I got in on Thursday, but I didn’t catch up with her until it was too late, and that’s the truth. I went by her room at La Quinta, but she wasn’t in, and that’s as close as I got until the hospital.”

“All right. Maybe she cut a little deal of her own with Vick to keep quiet about the payola thing. That’d be a shame, because a couple of guys got a lot more for it than she did.”

“And you don’t know who the couple of guys are, do you?” I shook my head.

“And the police don’t know anything about this angle, do they?”

“No, not yet.” I suddenly felt stupid, inadequate. Between the drawn curtains and the wet girl, the room felt claustrophobic. I wanted to get out of there, but not until I had resolved to do something right for a change. As weary as I was of Barbra’s chronic suspicion and mercurial outbursts, I didn’t want to expose her to the same kind of risk her friend had stumbled into. She was bound to be precious to someone.

“I read the papers, Martin. I get the picture. I know that Bingo Torres is one dangerous Mexican. Just because Vick got his deal without any exposure doesn’t mean Bingo would appreciate people sticking their noses where they don’t belong. You’d better stay away from him.”

“I plan on it.”

“Well, what else can we do?”

“You should dry your hair, and I need to get ready for a gig tonight. I’ll check on you afterwards. If you want, we can go to the police in the morning. How’s that?”

“Going to the police is fine with me, Martin. I want to know why what happened to Retha happened, and I want the people who did it to pay. You haven’t done your part yet.”

“There you go again,” I said.

She was shaking. She looked around the room, at the four walls, at my feet, a lot of white showing in her eyes. “I wish you weren’t playing tonight. I’m scared to go out. Men are still following me.”

“Just wait here for me, OK?”

She nodded. “Don’t forget about me. Or Retha.”

That was not likely.

&&&

I didn’t know who would be following Barbra Quiero. I didn’t want it to be Bingo’s men, but I couldn’t imagine who else it would be. Something wasn’t quite right. Bingo had warned me that he’d deal harshly with anyone who was thinking about testifying against him. Maybe Retha hadn’t taken his warning seriously enough.

But why would Bingo’s men be following Barbra? The deal with IMF was done, history. She’d have nothing to gain by exposing Vick’s relationship with Bingo. And Bingo had little to fear from the exposure of his ties to Vick. Or did he? Maybe something besides payola was the dirty laundry here.

There was also something off-key about Barbra’s suggestion that
Vick
tried to have Retha killed over the exposure of his ties to Bingo. He’d told me about their association, and I hadn’t felt like my life was in danger. Besides, Leo had alibied Vick and Ed.

But that gave me little comfort. When I got home I gave Leo a call. Nadine said he’d gone to sound check. Sound check? We never did a sound check at Antone’s. We’d played there five hundred times, for chrissakes. They just got a new PA system, she said, everyone’s been trying to call you—don’t you check your answering machine anymore? I fed the cat, packed up the Danelectro, and headed over there.

As I crossed the lake a plane flew overhead, heading west. I wondered if Carson Block was on it. I also wondered if the rest of the IMF crew had gone back to LA. Maybe they were keeping an eye on Barbra. I checked my rearview mirror. As I changed lanes, a late model Ford changed lanes, too. I wondered if someone was keeping an eye on me.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“MIKE CHECK, CHECK ONE TWO.”

Bam, BAM, buh-duh-duh, buh-duh-duh, BAM-BAM, BOOM.

“MIKE CHECK, CHECK ONE TWO, CHECK.”

Some people may assume that a band just shows up at the club a few minutes before show time, has a couple of cocktails and cigarettes, and saunters onstage, plugs in, and lets the magic happen. Sometimes we did it that way, more or less. Especially in Austin at a familiar venue or on the road at a club with a good sound system and staff. On those occasions, the roadies would go down to the club and set up the gear while the band showered, shaved, dressed, and let the road kinks fall out. Then there were the occasions where we didn’t know what kind of sound system, acoustics, or people we’d be dealing with. Sometimes the club manager or promoter would need a bit of schmoozing, or maybe even a show of force. Then the sound check could present all sorts of opportunities, between watching the roadies rewire the club’s equipment, playing pool or video games, doing an interview, or just meeting some of the locals. Sometimes we jammed and had even been known to write a decent song or two during an impromptu rehearsal in front of a happy hour crowd.

Then there were the times when the PA didn’t work. Or the club manager tried to renegotiate our contract after we pulled in. Or an amp didn’t work, or one of us was hung over or just plain pissed off and we’d have an argument in front of people we didn’t know.