Contract Null & Void

Chapter Twenty-seven

Every stool along the stick was full, and half the tables besides; Bart Heslip had not seen it that way before on a weeknight. Another difference: Mood Indigo’s crowd was usually whitebread except for Sleepy Ray, but tonight it was half black.

The stitches in Bart’s knife-slashed shoulder were itching. Supposed to mean you were healing up. He twisted the caps off three longneck beers, poured out a brace of shots of the house blended, put them all on a tray, and swung open the serving arm of the bar to take them to one of the tables.

“Hear Mood Indigo is going back to live entertainment,” said one of the men he was serving.

He was as plum black as Bart himself, but bulky enough to be a 49er defensive lineman. Hell, maybe he was. But if so, what was he doing in a lousy joint like this?

“Was a sister in here beltin’ the blues last night,” said the man’s lady, who was the color of chocolate milk and had on vivid red lipstick and a gold-colored wide-shouldered dress and wore her hair in a 1940s style Bart recognized from old films.

Damn! Maybelle’s singing last night! Who would have guessed people would be so hungry for a big fat mama beltin’ out the blues? He put down one of the beers in front of the woman.

“Heard Sleepy Ray Sykes was on piano,” said the other man at the table in an almost awed voice. He was middle-aged, his kinky hair white at the sides, thinning on top, his features neat and fitting his face perfectly, as if he had been sculpted by the years. He was smoking a cigar as long as his arm and had a cased musical instrument on the floor beside his chair. “Used to play a whole lotta piano at Bop City.”

“If the lady shows up tonight, maybe he’ll play again.”

Ballard went back behind the bar and saw Sleepy Ray had come in and, because his usual stool was taken, had found a place to stand down at the far end.

“Speak of the devil,” said Bart as he poured out the usual shot of Seagram’s. “You working tonight?”

“Night off,” said Sleepy Ray. He was dressed nattier than usual, wearing the first tie Bart had seen around his skinny brown neck. “Jes’ thought I’d drop around for a spell.” He leaned forward, asked very casually, “That Maybelle, she been around tonight?”

“No, and I don’t really expect her, Ray—”

“God hates a liar, boy.” Sleepy Ray was gazing at the door behind Bart with utmost delight.

Maybelle was sailing into the club in her shimmery red dress like a schooner under full sail. Sleepy Ray had already picked up his shot and was angling toward the unoccupied table closest to the jukebox. He said to Bart over his shoulder, “A Bud for the lady,” and held her chair for Maybelle.

The backbar phone rang. He picked up.

“Yeah, Mood Indigo.”

“I hear you had some trouble at close-up last night,” said Charlie Bagnis’s voice without preamble.

“Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

“I heard that, too. Listen, I’ll be over in a few minutes to spell you. Couple guys’ll wanna talk to you. Outside.”

Bart started to object, then caught himself. Wasn’t this why he was still hanging around here? Maybe this was the break he’d been waiting for. His shoulder ached, reminding him of the night before. Any trouble, he’d put these guys’ lights out, too.

“I’ll be here,” he said, and hung up abruptly. It fit the image he was trying to build here: a not-too-bright tough guy with an eye out for a fast buck.

He carried Maybelle’s longneck and a glass over to the table. She and Sleepy Ray were talking earnestly together.

“Here’s your beer, lady,” he said in his harsh, damaged-vocal-cords voice.

“Thank you.” Maybelle gave a sudden little-girl’s giggle and added, “Bart.”

“Aw, Jesus Christ,” he said in his regular voice. Then he added, from the side of his mouth, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, you walk into mine...”

Laughter shook her big body in the shimmery red dress.

“Bart Heslip, I swear—”

“Hush, Maybelle,” he said. He leaned in close. “I’m in undercover here, not using my real name, doesn’t anybody know except Larry. I mean nobody. Not even Corinne. Not even” — he pointed at Sleepy Ray — “him, though God knows what that sly old fox might of guessed.”

“I be the three monkeys, boy,” said Sleepy Ray, making appropriate hand gestures. “See no, hear no, speak no...”

“I’ll tell you both all about it when I can. Okay?”

“We ain’t here for nothing ’cept makin’ some music. Ain’t that right, Maybelle?”

“It’s the truth,” she said solemnly. She realized it was nothing but the truth: she was here to make music. Of course! Making music was what she should have been doing all along.

As he strutted off the stage at the end of their first set, Death was on a high. He was a tremendous star, and he would soon be screwing that fat little bitch in his dressing room.

A local high school groupie who served as security met them at the closed dressing room door with his eyes big and round.

“What’s wrong?” demanded Death in ill-concealed alarm.

They’d beefed up security in the backstage area after that Philistine money-grubber from the music store had come around demanding that they keep up the payments on their band equipment. They’d sicced the fans on him, dude was lucky to get away with all his teeth and nothing broken.

“Wrong? Wrong? Jesus, man...”

He blindly thrust a small rectangle of stiff paper into Death’s hand. It was dark in the hallway, so the four of them trooped into their permanently trashed dressing room to see what was written on the calling card in those classy letters that stand up off the paper. In the upper left-hand corner was the Warner logo in miniature, like they flash on the screen before a Warner picture is shown in a movie theater. In the center of the card the lettering read:

Across the bottom of the card was an address (in Beverly Hills!) and telephone and fax numbers. But all their bulging eyes could encompass was that single word Talent!

From Warner Music!

“Hi, gents,” said a voice, “I’m Red Grolsch.”

Red Grolsch, the talent hunter, advancing on them with outstretched hand, dressed just the way a Hollywood music scout should dress. Grolsch shut the door, shook hands all around.

“I caught your set, gents. Ab-so-lutely dye-no-myte!!!”

Death was trying to be blase, but his words came out in a quickly squelched falsetto. “How did...” He tried again, in his own voice. “How did you, ah... hear about us?”

“Word about a really hot band always gets around, and after all, finding... talent... is my job.”

Grolsch led the way across the room as if it were his, not theirs, drew a hard-back chair up to the unvarnished, deeply initialed coffee table, and waved them to the broken-down green couch and the chairs flanking it as if he were their host.

“And I caught your act a couple of nights ago. Incognito. Band knows they’re being scouted they get excited and either play above their heads or go in the toilet.”

“And you came back tonight?” demanded Love in a tight, high, excited voice.

“I had to. Dy-no-myte!”

Grolsch swept his arm across the coffee table, sending everything on it crashing to the floor. Blow Me Baby was stunned by the sudden action, but he wasn’t through: he reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a small flat plastic Baggie filled with white crystalline powder. He leaned forward and put it in the center of the newly cleared table.

They stared at it, then looked up at his freckled, leathery drinker’s face and hound-dog blue eyes totally devoid of guile.

“Yesterday I called my boss down in L.A. and told him to crank up the Lear and fly up here tonight. I’m picking him up at the Eureka City Airport in a few minutes.”

“Your... boss?” asked blond Hate.

“The president of Warner Music, who else? I want you boys to delay your second set until we get back from the airport.” He pointed at the Baggie. “That’s LaLa sneeze to show my appreciation of that set you just blew.” Grolsch was on his feet, smiling down at them. “This is gonna be your boys’ big break, and this’ll just smooth the way a bit.”

He started for the door, paused before opening it.

“Don’t go out there until we get back, and keep all your security people here on the door just in case any of this leaks out. I want my boss to see you in a normal set so he can see just how good you guys really are.”

Already opening the Baggie, they barely heard him.

O’B pulled the door shut behind him and went in search of Hitler and Betty Boop. He figured they had a good clear twenty minutes to get away with Blow Me Baby’s instruments and amps. He opened the stage door enough to see the biker and his mama waiting in the parking lot outside. He waved them in.

When they came through the door, he said, “Let’s start grabbing the instruments” — just as the noisy fight by Hitler’s fellow bikers broke out at the far end of the bar.

“All of them?” asked Betty Boop.

“Yeah, everything — including the amps.”

“Whadda we do with ’em?” demanded Hitler.

“Into the longbed Dakota next to their van.”

A few curious faces watched from their tables lining the cavernous walls as they started carting off the instruments, but nobody challenged them. The fight by the front door had developed into a mini-riot that was spreading out across the wide-open middle of the room. But the Baggie of coke would keep Blow Me Baby in their dressing room.

The instruments were in great condition, except for the four sets of Marshall Stack amplifiers. One set could do for a four-piece band, but Death, Taxes, Love and Hate had the egos — if not the talent — to insist on each having his own set. Secondhand, at least, retailing for a grand each instead of two.

O’B and Hitler heaved them into the truck as Betty Boop carefully arranged them in place. The yellow sulfur lights of the parking lot raised the painted-over names of previous-owner bands — all of them unknown — on the sides of the speakers. Death’s set a record: eight previous bands had failed to drum up the hysteria for fame and the big bucks.

Looked like heavy metal had a short shelf life in Eureka.

When they were finished, he dealt Hitler and Betty Boop each a hundred-dollar bill, then added a third.

“Great work, guys.”

Betty Boop gave him a little-girl kiss on the cheek as she tucked the bill in her monumental cleavage and O’B gunned the truck away into the night.