remake of
I shrugged. “I know Slim, and I just happen to believe that he didn’t kill her.”
“Oh,” he said, then snorted, “that ought to convince a jury.”
It was monumentally hard not to hate him. I squirmed, trying to figure out some way to get what I needed out of him without letting him know what I knew in return. My prospects of pulling this off seemed dim.
“From all the people I’ve interviewed, I now have a composite portrait of Rebecca Gibson. That portrait is of someone who’s spent years working to make it, is finally on the brink of major stardom, and who then, tragically, is brought down by the petty jealousies and angers of less-talented people. At first, it was just a matter of figuring out which little person she left behind was pissed off enough to kill her. Now I’m not so sure.”
The waitress brought our drinks and set them down. Agon picked up his six-dollar goblet of wine and snarfed down three dollars’ worth in one gulp, then motioned to the waitress for another.
He glared at me, traces of wet red around his lips. “Stop pulling my pud,” he said.
I fought a wave of nausea at the thought. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve stumbled-and I think
I contemplated getting up and walking out. But he’s right; everything had a price, and the price of getting what I needed from him was putting up with his crap.
“So what’s it going to cost?”
“Information for information. If you know something, I want to know it. You find out who murdered Rebecca Gibson, it comes to me first.”
I sat back and breathed a sigh of resignation. I should have expected that.
“I have information that indicates Rebecca’s manager may be in serious financial trouble.”
“What kind of information?”
“I know the guy who, within the next day or so, is going to repossess his Rolls.…”
Agon whistled, then drained his goblet as the waitress brought him another. She set the glass in front of him; he wrapped one corpulent hand around the stem, then drummed a thick set of fingers on the table next to it.
“Well, well, well …” His eyes flicked from side to side. “So Mr. Ford has taken the high road to Needham. …”
“Yeah, no kidding. What I’m trying to do is figure out what’s going on with him. How could this happen?”
He looked from the wineglass to me, his eyes a glimmer of light through the slits of his fat eyelids.
“I don’t know if this is going anywhere or not,” I said. “The fact that he was hard up for dough is no reason to have murdered Rebecca Gibson. After all, she was going to make him a millionaire, right? That’s why I don’t think he killed her. Still, I want to find out where this leads.” I stared at him for a second as he polished off dollars seven through nine of the Woodbridge merlot. You know, these grape drinks last longer when you don’t slug them down, I thought. Agon’s liver must look like it had undergone an artillery barrage. “So can you help me?”
He sighed. “This is the very sleaziest form of gossip imaginable,” he said, lowering his voice well below the lunchtime din. I had to ease in closer to catch what he was saying. “And I never pass on scurrilous gossip.”
“I know that, Agon,” I said. “You’ve got too much journalistic integrity.”
God, I hope I wore my lightning-proof Jockey shorts this morning.
“Mac Ford is a man of many vices, and a man of great passions as well.”
“What kinds of vices?”
“For one thing, he smokes rather a large amount of marijuana. Always has. To him, it’s nothing more serious than those foul cigars. I understand he grows his own, on some three hundred acres he owns in the Dominican Republic. He’s paid off the local officials, goes down there several times a year to frequent prostitutes, party, and take care of his crop. He’s also been known to roll a dollar bill up every now and then, if you get my drift. He drinks quite a bit of expensive brandy as well, although I’d hesitate to call that a real vice. Quite a lifestyle he has-traveling all over the world in pursuit of pleasure and his own screwy business deals. You know he’s produced quite a number of albums?”
“Really?”
“Yes, all of them losers. The Bonne Nuit Haitian Smoke and Kettle Club Band, for example, a bunch of ‘Hey, mon’ dope smokers and drum bangers. You know, those awful Caribbean metal instruments made out of oil drums?”
“Yeah, I don’t know what those are called. And I never heard of the band.”
“Neither has anyone else,” he said. The waitress arrived with our food. Agon’s steak was about the size of a small hubcap and covered in hollandaise sauce. It looked exquisite. My club sandwich looked feeble.
“Word on the Row is that Ford has made a string of imprudent decisions,” Agon said, sliding the first chunk of steak between his lips. His jowls vibrated as he chewed. “You knew he lost at least four major acts last year. Let’s see, there was Cathy Fields, Alan Simpson, the Prospectors, Emerald Jade.”
I’d heard of all the above, since they’d each had more than one hit record in the past couple of seasons. Losing stroke like that had to knock hell out of Ford’s cash flow.
“The conventional wisdom was that he’d lost his touch,” he said. “While he was brilliant in his day, the magic is gone. Perhaps it’s burnout. Maybe drugs, booze, age. Who knows? Some people have sense enough to see the end coming and prepare for it.”
He shook his head, cheeks packed with food. “But most don’t.”
“But there wasn’t any evidence that Rebecca was going to desert him, was there? Had there been any talk of that on the street?”
“Nothing that I’d heard.” He polished off the glass of merlot and waved for yet a third. “But that doesn’t mean anything. It’s not something that these rednecks usually plan out in advance. The managers often don’t know until they get hit in the face with it. It’s all done very secretly, with great treachery and a lot of behind-the-scenes manipulation.”
“Even if she was going to leave, why would it benefit him to kill her?”
His eyes narrowed until they disappeared and became thin dark lines across the pink of his face. “That’s what you have to find out, isn’t it?”
“How can I do that?” I asked. “That’s what’s got me confounded.”
“I can give you two pieces of information that might help.”
“Please do.”
He shifted his cud from one side to the other and looked impatiently in the direction of the waitress. I checked over my shoulder as she brought the glass and set it down.
“More tea?” she asked.
I let a thought slip into voice mode. “Can I afford it?”
She laughed. “Don’t be silly. Tea refills are free.”
She topped off my glass and left. I took my first bite of the sandwich. Maybe it was the mood I was in, but it tasted like cardboard. Then again, how good can cold cuts on toasted white bread be?
“First of all,” Agon said when she’d left, “it might help you to know that Ford has a steady lover. Someone who’s been quietly with him for years …”
I waited while he chewed through two more chunks of steak the size of doughnuts. “You going to tell me her name, Agon?” I asked impatiently. Careful, I thought, don’t want to lose him now.
“Faye Morgan.”
I gave him a sideways look. “C’mon, I don’t believe it. She’s in her thirties. I’d always pictured guys like Ford having
“That’s who he’s usually seen in public with. Faye’s been in his life for years, though. They’re both very closemouthed about it, but I’ve heard it’s her choice that their affair remain discreet.”
“Given Ford’s reputation, I can understand that. I hope she gets a blood test every few months.”
“That’s tacky,” he said, “but probably true.”
“Okay, what’s the second thing?”
