Baby, Would I Lie?

27

The automobile that Sara and Cal shared, he driving, as he took her out to see Ray Jones’s house, was a maroon Jaguar town car with the steering wheel on the right instead of the left. So the car had been built for use in Britain and its Commonwealth, or maybe Japan or some other part of the world where traffic keeps to the left, and it had either originally been driven in that country or had been bought this way by Ray Jones to show off. Whichever the case, Sara found it unsettling to be in the driver’s seat, looking out through the windshield at the uneven and nerve-racking traffic of southern Missouri in tourist season, and have neither steering wheel nor foot controls for comfort. Her foot kept stabbing for the brake, her hands kept twitching in her lap, and it wasn’t until they were in Hollister, where everybody had to slow down a bit, that she could divert enough attention from the road to say, “This is a nice car. How come Ray happens to own it?”

“He bought it from Jeremy Irons,” Cal said, laconic and open, both eyes on the road.

Pursue that? No. Clearly, it was one of those facts that was best left alone. The whole story, even if she managed at last to mine it out of Cal, would have as its connecting core something commonplace like a shared agent or a booking manager’s mother’s next-door neighbor. Leave it where it is: A country singer in Branson, Missouri, owns a right-wheel Jaguar that he bought from Jeremy Irons.

All of which led Sara to remember the first rule of life, a rule that all reporters and many other people are well aware of. The first rule of life is: Everything is either mysterious or boring — that is, either unknown or known. The unknown is mysterious and the known is boring. This postulate explains everything and is therefore boring. (The corollary is that insecure people prefer to be bored because it’s safe.)

Everywhere you go in the vicinity of Branson, Missouri, the vehicle driving ahead of you is either a cement mixer (because of the massive amount of cheap construction going on) or a Ride the Ducks open-top bus. This time, as they drove from Hollister around to Table Rock Dam, just down to the right from which Belle Hardwick had been so furiously murdered, it was a Ride the Ducks bus leading the way. Tourist children leaped and bounced on top of the thing as though it were a popcorn maker and they the corn, while their parents excitedly jabbed one another and pointed at trees.

At the turnoff to Jjeepers! and the Porte Regal golf course/condo/luxury-living complex, the Ride the Ducks bus went straight ahead, taking the tourist families to wherever it is the tourist families go (someplace with fried food), and Cal turned the Jaguar right. He slowed for the speed bump by the guard shack and waved at the guard. Sara noticed that the guard never looked at her, in the normal driver position, but looked straight at Cal to wave back, which meant this was a known vehicle here and suggested the guard turnover was slow enough so they’d learn the residents’ cars. A question, of course, that would eventually come up in the trial: Was that definitely Ray Jones’s red Acura SNX coming through the gate shortly after the murder, and who was behind its wheel?

Porte Regal was as artificial and well maintained as Disneyland. The earth will have to live another 3 or 4 million years before it naturally produces a surface this smoothly rolling and evenly unscarred. Real trees here somehow looked slightly smaller than life-size, and therefore not real. The low buildings were all in earth tones, suggesting that had there been any scenery, they would have blended in with it. For most of the drive, the golf course was visible, just beyond a condo complex or through a mustered platoon of trees.

Cal drove almost to the far end of the complex, slowly, braking with care at each spot where the golf-cart track crossed the road. The occasional large American car passed, going the other way, and at times golfers were close enough to the road to have recognizable faces, but Cal didn’t do any more waving after the front-gate guard. There wasn’t much of a sense here of a community.

Ray Jones’s house was wide and low, a southwestern ranch style on an extremely flat parcel of land nicely furred with very green and very short grass. Beyond the house, the land dipped just slightly as though curtsying, then swept up past the golf-cart track to the golf course. Shrubbery had been planted at the hem of the house by a professional in such matters, but the rest of the land had been left open, as though in fear of Indian attack. The broad blacktop driveway leading to the three-car attached garage looked liquid, almost molten, and Sara was disappointed when the Jaguar’s tires didn’t sink into it at all, didn’t even leave a wake.

“Here we are,” Cal said, of course, and cut the engine. They got out of the car, and the air seemed nicer here somehow, as though the thoughtful operators of Porte Regal had installed a massive dehumidifier somewhere.

“This way,” Cal said, and Sara walked around the Jag to follow him along the curving path of large round fake stones to the front door.

Cal had a key. He unlocked the door, opened it, and said, “Gimme a second here.”

“Sure.”

An alarm keypad was mounted on the wall a few feet to the left of the door. Cal went to it and punched in a number, too fast to follow. Grinning at Sara, he said, “If I don’t do that, we’ll get all kinds of security around here.”

Sara nodded at the keypad. “You know a funny thing?” she said. “Most people, it turns out, use their own birthday as their code number on those pads.”

Cal blinked a lot but otherwise merely looked politely interested. “They do?”

“A person like Ray Jones,” Sara said. “His birthday’s public knowledge, isn’t it? Listed in People or USA Today or some fan magazine somewhere?”

Cal thought about that. The blinking stopped. “Huh,” he said.

“Just thought I’d mention it.”

“You’re real good,” Cal allowed, and beamed upon her. “I’ll tell Ray he oughta change it.”

“Make it your birthday,” she suggested.

“Or yours.”

“No, you’ll want to know the year.” Sara stepped forward from the entry way, looking at a large, airy, well-furnished, comfortable, pleasant, impersonal living room. “Nice place.”

“Ray worked with the architects and the designers and all them people. Every step of the way.”

“You can see his personality in it.”

Cal gave her a sharp look; so the zingers didn’t zing by him after all, did they? So she fessed up, grinning and saying, “That was just a joke.”

“When you lived in as many hotel rooms and motel rooms and buses as Ray Jones,” Cal said, “this here is your personality.”

“I suppose it is.”

“Come on, let me show you around.”

The house was comfortable, God knows, and maybe Cal was right. After years on the road, maybe deep impersonal comfort, clean uncluttered comfort, simple low-maintenance comfort, was Ray Jones’s personality — or, in any event, his ideal.

Cal expected Sara to particularly admire the kitchen, being she was a woman, and she accommodated him by admiring it with extravagant ignorance, being a woman who felt that the first step in any recipe at home was to pick up a Chinese menu and the second step was to pick up the phone. She also admired the hexagonal dining room, with its air-traffic controller’s view of — what else? — the golf course. And also the big game room downstairs with its bar and its pool table and its Ping-Pong table and its giant built-in TV screen. She admired the master bedroom, large enough and with a deep-enough wall-to-wall shag carpet so a person could sleep on a different rectangle every night for a year. And the two guest rooms, too, both of which were modeled after better-quality motel rooms and showed not the slightest indication of recent — or any, come to think of it — use.

“No children?” Sara asked.

Guarded, Cal said, “Ray’s estranged from his two daughters.”

“How old are they?”

“Twenty-three and twenty-six.”

“Did the estrangement begin when he started going out with girls younger than them?”

“Before that,” Cal said. “When Cherry took them away.”

“The ex-wife. I’m remembering.”

“Ray’s trying to forget,” Cal said. “He give Cherry a lot of money to just go away and leave him alone, and he told the girls to see him anytime they wanted, but Cherry turned them against him.”

“What are their names?”

“Christy and Charly,” Cal said, and spelled them both, then added, “Their real names are Christine and Charlotte.”

“And Cherry’s real name is Shirley.”

Cal’s brow furrowed. “I don’t think so,” he said.

The tour finished, the non-probing questions shallowly answered, they wound up back in the living room, where Cal said, “Want to see a tape?”

Always a surprise from Cal. “What kind of tape?”

“Ray working, here in the living room.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, looking around for gym mats or Nautilus machines. “Exercise tapes?”

“Naw,” Cal said, amused by her. “See, what the thing is with Ray, he had so many years running late at night, he has trouble to go to sleep early, and this is an early town.”

“I noticed,” Sara agreed.

“So he set up equipment in here,” Cal explained, “and when he can’t sleep, he comes in and practices songs, works on new songs, and puts it all on videotape.”

“In here?”

“Let me show you,” Cal said, and crossed to the inner living room wall, opposite the front door, beyond the baby grand piano that jutted out from the right. The space back there was dominated by a mahogany built-in structure with open shelving to display memorabilia, plus some sections closed off by heavy dark ornate Mexican-looking doors. Opening a couple of these doors, Cal revealed a large TV monitor, a VCR, extra sound equipment, and a small TV camera mounted and fixed in place, pointing straight ahead.

Resisting the impulse to flinch away from that TV eye, Sara said, “Is that thing on?”

“No, no, there’s a red light up here on top, tells you when it’s recording. And these two show lights here come on, or the picture’d be too dark.”

Cal opened another of the Mexican doors, to reveal rows of videotapes, each with pen-and-ink notations on the spine. “Ray saves his tapes,” Cal explained, “in case there’s something good on them he can use later.”

Sara went over to look at the tape boxes. Each was dated in spidery but firm writing, and most included a word or two under the date, probably to indicate what song Ray had been working on that night. A lot of the tapes were marked “IRS,” which must be the song she’d heard him sing on the bus, and which suggested his tax problem had been looming large in his mind for some time now.

Sara said, “Now I get it. I know he said one time, he was sorry he didn’t tape the night of the killing, and I didn’t know what he meant.”

Pointing, Cal said, “Sure. You see? Nothing for July twelfth. And that would have proved he was here instead of out anywhere with Belle or anybody.”

“Well, the prosecutor would say he’d altered the date, wouldn’t he?”

“Then why didn’t he?” Cal asked reasonably, and pointed to another tape, saying, “Just put a one in front of July second.”

“Maybe he should have,” Sara said.

“Too late now,” Cal said, and reached for a tape. “Want to see one?”

“Sure.”

Turning the equipment on, inserting the tape, Cal said, “I’ll play you this one because it’s a song you won’t know.”

“Why not? I’ve been to his show.”

“He’s still working on it; he don’t feel like it’s a hundred percent ready. Well, you’ll see. Sit down there, why don’tcha.”

Sara sat in one of the low well-padded armchairs facing the screen from across the room. Cal started the tape and moved to a similar chair, saying, “Let me know when you had enough.”

“Absolutely.”

Snow. An image. This room, this identical room, but at night. What must be the show lights Cal mentioned made deep shadows in the background, so that the chair Sara was sitting in made a shadow in its screen persona that reached almost all the way back to the door, which was hardly visible at all.

What was mostly visible, standing about halfway between Sara’s chair and the screen, was Ray Jones, in black T-shirt and jeans, barefoot. He’d brought out a dining room chair to put one foot on, with his guitar resting on that raised leg. At first, he didn’t look at the screen at all, but at his fingers working out chords on the guitar. Then he hummed a bit, then he sang a few words, then went back to his guitar work some more.

“Takes him a while to get into it,” Cal said.

“It’s fascinating,” Sara said. And it was. She watched Ray Jones work out notes, chords, progressions, then fit the words into the music, sometimes changing a word, sometimes a note, sometimes merely an emphasis.

After a while, Ray put the guitar down on the chair and went over to the piano, which was barely within camera range and quite poorly lit, so that he almost disappeared when he sat down to play. Four or five minutes, he spent at the piano, and during that time he did no singing, merely tested his melody, altering, changing, changing back, pounding away with varying accompaniments in the left hand. He was an accomplished pianist, which was a surprise to Sara, but with no delicacy of tone; every note came out with the same thudding precision.

After the piano, Ray went back to the chair and the guitar, and for the first time he looked at the camera and acted like a performer. He sang part of the song, a longer and more coherent stretch of it than before, but then broke off and did some more second-guessing. And so on.

When it was all over and done, Sara was astonished to discover she had just spent an hour and five minutes watching that tape. It had all been disjointed and frustrating, one false start after another, but fascinating as well, as she had said to Cal at the beginning, to watch the determination and the knowledge of the man, to watch a workman good at his work doing his work.

It hadn’t been until the very end of the session that Ray had put the chair off to one side, stood flat-footed facing the camera, strummed the guitar, and sang the song all the way through:

At which point, Ray segued into “America! America! God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.” Then he stopped, and yawned, and said, “Enough.” He walked forward toward the camera, hand reaching out.

The tape went to snow. “Wow,” said Sara. “And he didn’t mention taxes once.”

“Nor murder, neither.” Crossing to the equipment, just as Ray had done, to rewind the tape and shut it all down, Cal said, “That’s gonna be his next release, after the trial.”

“If he’s released, after the trial.”

“Well, yeah,” said Cal.