dislike the government, it wouldn’t bother me that much if the marines choppered in, did a house-to-house, and confiscated every last goddamn one of them.
On the other hand, I wish I had one right now.
That wouldn’t do any good, though. What was I going to do, shoot the telephone? And if I’d had a gun, I might have put one into the guy that busted my windshield this afternoon. Then I could share a cell with Slim for a while.
I don’t even have a carry permit, despite Tennessee’s new Wild West law that allows anyone who’s not drunk or crazy to carry a concealed weapon. Somewhere in my office desk, though, was a little souvenir of another case I’d worked on. Lonnie’d given it to me when I’d refused his offer to supply me with a guaranteed clean throwaway gun.
I opened my center desk drawer. In the middle of the pile of debris that passed for my organizing system, buried beneath a stack of old business cards with the wrong address on them, was a piece of hard, palm-sized black plastic with a black cloth strap hooked to the side. A white decal with a lightning bolt through it read z-FORCE II, and below that 80,000v. There were four metal prongs poking out of one end of the case, two pointed outward and two test prongs pointed inward.
There was a switch on the side of the case. I placed it in the palm of my hand, flicked the switch on, and pressed a button on the other side of the case from the switch.
A crackling sound filled my office and a bright blue spark danced across the test prongs. Real Frankenstein lab stuff. At the bottom of the case, another decal read
WARNING: EXTREME DANGER. KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN. USE ONLY AS DIRECTED.
I thumbed the safety switch down and pressed the button one more time to make sure it was off and quiet. Then I tucked the stun gun into the right pocket of my suit jacket and left the office.
* * *
Anybody who’s hung around Music Row longer than your average tourist learns p.d.q. that there’s a dark side to all the glitter and rhinestones. I was never an insider; even as a newspaperman, I was just another entity to be manipulated by the PR machine. Anybody who’s lived here longer than a few months, though, picks up on it. It’s not just the money and the drugs, the deals and the steals, the lives and careers made and ruined over a handshake that may or may not be as dependable as a signed contract, and God knows how dependable even a signed contract would be. It’s something even darker than all that. I’ve always thought it was not only ironic, but poetically just, that Music Row after the sun sets is one of the most dangerous areas in the city to walk around unprotected. Muggings, rapes, robberies, even murder, are not all that uncommon on the Row. The sun sets, the vampires come out. Smart people carry wooden stakes and silver bullets.
I was glad I had the stun gun with me, even if the sun wasn’t completely down yet. It was after five; the traffic on I-40 slowed to a walk in both directions as far as the eye could see. I turned left off Broadway and cut over to Demonbreun, then doglegged left around the freeway entrance and wound my way on a side street behind the Music Row Shoney’s and onto Division.
Down Division, the Faron Young Building sat perched on a bluff overlooking the traffic jam on the interstate. The two-story structure was brown brick and had a parking lot big enough to accommodate a fleet of tour buses. I pulled into the lot and took my choice of a couple hundred spaces.
The building was occupied mostly by independent record companies, booking agencies, and freelance writers and photographers. Every office seemed to be related, in one way or another, to the industry.
I scanned the directory, then moseyed down the hall to IBA, the International Booking Agency. Most of the offices were still open. I checked my watch again. Maybe I’d get lucky.
The decor was dark paneling, set off by worn carpet. The odors of cigarettes and stale coffee permeated the hallways. I stopped in front of a solid wooden door with a gold-and-brown plaque-IBA-mounted on it.
Inside, an overweight woman with the last vestiges of teenage acne and a terrible bleach job sat behind a gray metal desk. She filed her nails with a scraggly emery board as I closed the door behind me, and never missed a beat. To her left, a computer monitor sat on the desk, its screen saver floating multicolored balloons across the glass. Dozens of badly framed photographs covered the wall, mostly head or group shots of country- music acts. Three pictures over from the receptionist’s desk, a photograph of Rebecca Gibson strumming a huge twelve-string still hung. It gave me a chill to look at it.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
I edged over to the desk and smiled down at her. There were traces of tomato sauce on the front of her blouse, and her mismatched bright turquoise skirt threatened to disintegrate at the seams if it didn’t get some relief soon.
“I’d like to see Faye Morgan, please.”
The filing stopped as she focused on my face through smudged wire-rim glasses.
“You got an appointment?”
“No, but it’s about the murder of Rebecca Gibson.” I took out my license case and flipped it open in front of her. “My name’s Harry James Denton. I’m a private investigator.”
At that, she sat up and reached across the desk with her free hand. She held the bottom of the license steady for a second as she studied.
“Dadgum,” she said. “I never seen one of those.”
I smiled at her as sweetly as I was able, then brushed the bottom of her fingers with mine. “It’s real. I promise.”
She looked into my eyes and smiled, then settled back in the chair, hinges squealing in distress. “I’ll see if Ms. Morgan has a moment to spare.”
I kept the smile pasted on. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”
She picked up the phone and pressed the intercom button. “Faye, there’s a guy out here.…” Then she spoke too softly for me to hear. I stepped away from her desk and studied the office. The waiting room was maybe twelve by fifteen, with a couple of doors leading off into what I assumed were private offices. Not much to look at, really, for an agency that billed itself as international.
Behind me, the receptionist hung up the phone. “Ms. Morgan will be right with you. Can I fix you a cup of coffee?”
“No, thank you. Say, you guys represent all these groups?”
“We have at one time or another,” she answered.
“Restless Heart, Willie Nelson, Asleep at the Wheel,” I read off the titles on the publicity photos. “Carlene Carter! Wow, she’s one of my favorites!”
I crossed the room over to Rebecca’s picture. “Too bad about Rebecca Gibson, huh? I only heard her sing live once, but she sure was something else.”
“Yeah,” the receptionist said. She was bored now, back to filing her nails. “If you like that sort of thing.”
I leaned down toward her and lowered my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “What was she like? Really, I mean?”
The emery board stopped midstroke, and her voice lowered to match mine. “Well, I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, you know.”
Let me guess, I thought, in this case, you’re going to make an exception.
“Yeah?” I said grinning.
“She was a b-i-t-c-h of the first degree. I mean, you know, you expect these hillbilly singers to be kind of temperamental. Know what I mean? But she was h-e-double-hockey-sticks on wheels.…” She jabbed the emery board at me like a pointer, and as she did, an enormous slab of fat under her upper arm bobbed up and down in time to the shaking.
Behind me, a door opened and a throat cleared impatiently. I turned to meet a stern woman, medium height, small-boned, and very light, with curly auburn hair and light green eyes. She wore brown corduroy pants that fit tightly around her hips and narrow waist, with a silk blouse on top that matched the slacks perfectly. She was professional, subdued, and quite attractive.
“Gladys, hold my calls,” she said.
I turned and winked at Gladys, who retreated back into her desk chair like she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar, an experience she’d probably had many times before.
