Baby, Would I Lie?

15

Ray approved of Cal’s choice; the Trend girl was going to be exactly right.

The whole bunch of them were headed over to Forsyth together in the bus, Ray and his assistant Honey Franzen and his musical director Lennie Elmore and the musicians and Ray’s manager Chuck Wagner and his regular lawyer Jolie Grubbe, who couldn’t understand why he wanted a reporter aboard. “I need a sympathetic press,” Ray explained as they were boarding the bus in front of his house out at Porte Regal, the bus already half full of his people, none of them — happily — seeming to be drunk yet, at seven-thirty in the morning.

Jolie Grubbe, a tough lawyer of forty-something, a great big fat woman with no softness to her at all, said, “Sympathetic press? Are you crazy?”

“Probably. Get aboard the bus, Jolie.”

“There’s no such thing as a sympathetic press, Ray, you know that.”

“Bus.”

“Okay, okay.”

That big thick body heaved itself up the steps into the bus, Ray following. Jolie thudded into the front window seat on the right and Ray sat beside her. Across the aisle, according to his prearranged plan, Lennie Elmore occupied the window seat behind the driver, with Honey Franzen next to him. The rest of the guys were distributed in the seats behind him, taking up two-thirds of the bus’s interior, with the rear third holding a John and a galley kitchen. (This, when they toured, was the band’s bus. Ray would be in the other bus, with the bedroom and the shower and the other kitchen and the closets for costumes: his dressing room on wheels.)

Settled in her seat, recovered from the effort of climbing up into the bus, Jolie took up the theme again: “Trend isn’t gonna give you sympathetic press, Ray,” she said. “Trend is a lot of smartass New Yorkers; they blow their noses on shitkickers like you.”

“I have my reasons, Jolie,” Ray told her in the deadpan tone of voice that meant it was time to change the subject. He eyeballed her. “Okay?”

“Whatever you say,” Jolie said, miffed. As though he gave a shit.

Now they were all aboard except the girl reporter. The big silver bus with RAY JONES ON THE ROAD in bright red letters on its sides rolled slowly along the winding roads from Ray’s house through the golf course and the condos and the spread-out ranch-style houses to the main gate of Porte Regal and through, then pulled in at the parking lot of Jjeepers! the family restaurant just beyond the guard shack, where Cal had arranged that the girl reporter — Ray couldn’t seem to remember her name — would meet them.

And there she was, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, coming out of the air-conditioned restaurant with her big brown leather shoulder bag bouncing on her hip the instant the heavy bus, elephantine and graceful, eased on down into the parking lot. A good-looking woman, Ray noted, if you wanted somebody who could take dictation, but she didn’t look as though she’d take dictation, if you follow. Ray watched her cross the blacktop toward the bus, saw the intelligence and the eagerness and the professionalism and the big-city veneer, and knew she was going to be perfect.

Cal came down the aisle, like he was supposed to, and was there when the driver opened the bus door for the girl reporter to climb aboard. “Hi, Cal,” she said, springing lithely up the steps. “Thanks again.”

“Oh, sure,” Cal said, and gestured at Ray, saying, “This here’s Ray Jones. Ray, this’s Sara Joslyn, from that New York magazine.”

“H’are ya,” Ray said, and stuck his hand out, and hers was cool and dry and bony. They exchanged strong grips and she said, “I appreciate this, Mr. Jones. I know this is a tough time for you.”

“Our seats are back here,” Cal said, taking her arm, nipping that interview in the bud, and away they went.

That was the point, or part of it. Whatsername — Sara? — was to be permitted to hang around but not to get chummy. Not real access, not to the extent she would ever get the idea she was being set up, since in fact she was being set up. So, for today, she had just this minute been as close to Ray Jones as she was going to get.

The bus coughed and groaned and got itself rolling again, turning left onto 165 south, heading down toward Table Rock Dam to avoid all that traffic mess back up in Branson. Jolie wanted to spend their bus time talking about her latest dealings with Leon “The Prick” Caccatorro, the IRS guy; she was the one negotiating with the son of a bitch. The negotiations were necessary because, as it turned out, Ray had taken some wrong advice here and there, and he’d tuned out once or twice when he really should have been listening, and the way it wound up, all of a sudden he owed the feds so many millions of dollars, they could probably afford another senator or two if they got it all out of him.

Which, naturally, wasn’t going to happen, mostly because he didn’t have that kind of money. Maybe it had passed through his fingers at one time or another, but it was gone. So what was happening now was, like any other mob operation, the government was making itself Ray Jones’s partner. From now on, any dollar he earned, some of it would to go to his agent and some to his manager and some to his lawyer and some to his ex-wife and some would go to the IRS. What was being negotiated now was just what percentage of his income was going to be the feds’ blood money and how long this unwelcome partnership was going to last.

There was a certain amount of pressure on Ray to get these negotiations done and over with, because until they were behind him, he didn’t know what he could afford or even whether or not it would be worthwhile to go on working. But there was also a certain amount of pressure on the IRS, which helped to even things out. The pressure on the IRS was caused by the well-known uncertainties of both life and fame. If Ray Jones were to die, or if the fans were to turn against him (it had happened to others), the government just might find itself reaching for a slice of pie in an empty pie tin; better for them to make their deal while he was still riding relatively high, make their projections from this year’s earnings, not knowing what next year’s earnings might be.

And now, as if all of that weren’t complicated enough, they had this damn murder trial to put up with. For all the IRS knew, they were negotiating with a guy who’d be sniffing the state’s cyanide a year from now, which made Leon “The Prick” Caccatorro quite visibly nervous. Good.

The negotiations were stalled right now, mostly because of the murder trial, but that didn’t keep Jolie from going over every nuance of every word said by every participant at every meeting. Ray himself was staying out of those meetings, so he supposed he should be grateful to Jolie for taking the heat and just giving him the bits and pieces of the thing later, but Jesus! No matter how vitally important this IRS case might be in his life, in truth it was goddamn boring to listen to, and whenever Ray got bored, he eventually got irritated as well, no matter how hard he tried to be good and mature and adult.

This time, he lasted about fifteen minutes, to and through Hollister, the village across Lake Taneycomo from Branson. “Enough, Jolie,” he suddenly said, rising from his seat, stepping forward into the well next to the bus driver, grabbing the microphone from the built-in sound system under the big windshield. Out front, a Ride the Ducks amphibian vehicle full of tourists rolled along amid the campers and station wagons like something in a Road Runner cartoon. Ray gave it a look, waved back at the kids in the rear row of the open-topped amphibian, then turned to face the bus interior, thumbed on the mike, and said, “Everybody awake?”

Moans and groans.

“Good,” Ray said. “Let’s rehearse the new one.”

More moans and groans. Ray leaned back, half-seated on the shelf under the windshield, while the troops unlimbered their instruments. He could see the girl reporter back there next to Cal — damn! lost her name again — all wide-eyed and eager. Sure, let’s give her something to write home about.

Speaking into the mike, Ray called to the new reed man, Jerry, the guy who was taking Bob Golker’s place: “Jerry, you know the IRS song?”

“I been studying it,” Jerry called back. He was a skinny roundheaded guy with glasses, very cerebral; not as much fun as the drunken Bob Golker, but a better musician.

In the front row, next to Honey Franzen, Lennie Elmore leaned over to say, “He’s got it, Ray; he’s a quick study.”

“Okay.” Ray grinned at his people, in his world. “For the benefit of the reporter among us,” he said, wishing he could remember the damn woman’s name,“let me explain the background on this song. I’ve been having a little income-tax trouble lately—”

Jolie snorted.

“—and we’re still talking it over with the government people. Now, sometimes I get my songs out of my own life, and this is one of them. We’re not gonna do this song in public until we’ve cut our deal with the feds, so, little lady, you’re getting a preview here.”

She didn’t like “little lady,” he could see that. Well hell, maybe he was gonna have to write her name down somewhere. Meantime, screw her. “All set, boys?” he asked.

They were all set. This had to be an acoustic version, of course, with no bass and the drummer doing his part on the practice pad on his lap, but they could still all work at familiarizing themselves with the idea of the arrangement. Ray gave the beat, they did the intro, and in he came, sailing on top of the music, belting it to the bus as though the bus were Yankee Stadium:

They went through the song three times, the second time trying an idea of Lennie’s, in which the girls came in and sang counterpoint against him in the bridge, going:

But Ray didn’t like it. It didn’t do anything for him, or the song, or the emotion, or the relationship with the audience. So the third time, they did it without the girls, and that was better. Then Ray borrowed Peewee’s guitar and walked down the aisle to the girl reporter and said, “You don’t want to hear the same damn song over and over.”

“I’m enjoying it,” she said, grinning at him. “I can see why you won’t take it public until after you make your deal.”

He laughed, having a good time with her. “This one’s also autobiographical,” he lied, and strummed the guitar and went into it:

Finishing, he grinned at her, and she said, “Do you remember her name?”

“Ouch,” he said. “You got me, damn it. Tell me, and I’ll never forget it again.”

“Sara.”

“With or without the H?”

“Without.”

“Lean and mean, huh, Sara?” With another good ole boy grin, Ray tapped his forehead. “I got you now,” he said, “right here in the old computer.”

“I like the IRS song,” Sara Whatsit said. “And I liked the fried-food song, too.”

“Maybe we’ll share some fried food together sometime,” Ray said, and bent to look past her out the window at the beginnings of Forsyth. “Looks like we’re here,” he announced. “Catch you later.”

“You, too.”

Feeling he’d done well enough for day one, Ray went back to his seat, returning Peewee’s guitar along the way, and looked out the big windshield at the mob clustered around the courthouse, dead ahead. TV camera crews, cops, tourists, reporters, all kinds of people. He said, “I never knew old Belle had so many friends.”

“You give them what they want,” Jolie said, “they’ll come out for it.”

“I guess.”

By prearrangement, a space had been held open for the bus, where Ray would have the shortest and quickest route across the clear space to the building. A brown-uniformed trooper waved them into this slot, with so many hand gestures and body movements, you’d think they were landing a 747. The bus bunked the curb at last, stopped, and the driver opened the door, letting in the roar of the crowd.

Standing, yawning, stretching, Ray said, “Showtime.”

“Kill, tiger,” Jolie suggested.

Ray was the first one off the bus. Cops were holding the gawkers back, but their noise was terrific. Another uniformed trooper, this one older and with spaghetti on his hat to show he was of more importance around here, stepped forward, very formal, and said, “Raymond Vernon Jones?”

“I’ll say yes to that,” Ray told him, and started on by, but the trooper held up a hand to stop him, saying, “Raymond Vernon Jones, I have a warrant for your arrest. You have the right—”

“I already been arrested, pal,” Ray told him. “We went through this part of the act a long time ago.”

“This is a new warrant,” the trooper said.

Jolie was out of the bus now and standing beside Ray like a tough blimp. She said, “What’s it a warrant for, Officer?”

“Murder,” said the trooper.

Ray wanted this shit over with. “You’re on the wrong page, my friend,” he said. “All this is done and over. We’re here for the trial.”

“I have a warrant for your arrest, Raymond Vernon Jones,” the goddamn trooper said, refusing to be sidetracked, “for the murder of one Robert Wayne Golker. You have the right to remain silent...”

Ray did.