A Song to Die For (8 page)

He parked in his reserved spot, grabbed his guitar, and strolled down the dock to the slip where his houseboat waited. It was home, and he liked it. That houseboat was the best purchase he had made when the record royalties were still rolling in from his one hit song, “Written in the Dust.” He had paid cash for the boat, but he sometimes had trouble coming up with the slip rental and utilities nowadays. Between gambling and a few pickup guitar gigs, finances could get tight.

He stepped over the stern, unlocked the cabin door, and put his guitar in the corner. The light on his Code-A-Phone machine was blinking, so he pushed the button as he got undressed for a shower. A familiar voice spoke.

“Hey, Creed, it's Willie. Good show last night. Hey, I got a hot tip for you. Luster Burnett is coming out of retirement. Yeah,
the
Luster Burnett. I recommended you as a band leader. He wants to meet you. Monday at noon at his ranch on Nutty Brown Road. You'll know it's his place when you see the gate. It's Luster Burnett,
amigo
. Could be big if it works. Good luck.”

Creed felt his jaw hanging open. He pushed the rewind button and listened to the tape again. His heart began to thump, thinking of the opportunity. Luster Burnett was the biggest thing to hit country music after Hank Williams died. His songs began dominating the charts shortly after Hank's death, filling the void, but with his own lyrical style, a sense of humor, and an authentic country voice that could move souls to laughter or tears. As a songwriter, he broke new ground in country-western music, bringing a poetic style to the down-home genre.

In Creed's first band, before Jo Ann—or Dixie, as she called herself now—Creed had played every Luster Burnett hit to make the charts, and even some obscure album tracks he liked. And he knew all the guitar intros and solos—every riff and modulation. As a kid, he had listened to the 45s over and over, with the volume turned up loud so he could detect the nuances of the techniques the studio guitarists had put on those old tunes. If they hammered, he hammered. If they slid, he slid. Double-stops, pull-aways, chicken-pickin', you name it … He learned to play every lick just like the record.

Creed had also read up on Luster, and talked to people who had known him in Nashville. The tragic facts were that, at the height of Luster's career, his wife had died in a car wreck, sliding off an icy road while Luster was away on tour. Distraught, Luster had canceled all his appearances and studio sessions. Everyone knew how much he had loved his wife, but it was just a matter of time, they all thought, until Luster would return to his booming career. His press conference held a year to the day after the tragic wreck had shocked Music Row. Luster announced that he planned to permanently retire, never to cut another side, or play another show. The challenges were gone, he had said; the heart ripped out of his drive to create.

Gossip hounds followed him for a while as he moved back to his native Texas, taking up residence in his ranch house on Onion Creek outside of Austin, where he had buried his wife. Like Creed, he was said to enjoy gambling, and had recorded songs about gamblers and wild long-shot bets, so he was supposedly spotted in Vegas or Atlantic City over the years. He was seen in Texas honky-tonks and dance halls occasionally, listening to good country bands, but he gradually changed his appearance, until no one would know what to look for anymore even if they cared to look for the great Luster Burnett at all. Other stars took his place, and curiosity about him faded. His oldies still played on the radio, to which some deejay might remark, “That was the legendary Luster Burnett singing ‘Chuck Will's Widow.' Wonder whatever happened to him?”

It was as if he had died, and in fact some thought he was dead. Creed, himself, wondered sometimes. How could he just quit? Would he ever play even a farewell concert?

Now, as he stepped out of the tiny houseboat shower stall and grabbed a towel, Creed had his answer. Luster Burnett was making a comeback after fifteen years of silence. His mind was full of new questions. Why? Why now? Did Luster still have it? Could he still put on a show? Was he washed up? A drunk or a drug addict? Could that golden voice still sing?

There was much to do before meeting Luster tomorrow, but right now he was so excited that he knew he had to go out to Nutty Brown Road and figure out what Willie had meant about Luster's ranch gate. He pulled on some jeans, a paisley shirt, a leather bomber jacket, and some well-worn cowboy boots. Leaving the houseboat, he trotted toward the van until he heard some psychedelic rock blaring from the marina office. He saw the marina owner's Yamaha 650 parked beside his van. On a whim, he stuck his head into the office door, coughed at the marijuana smoke, and shouted for Stew.

“Stew? You decent?”

Stew was a hippie who had inherited the marina from his grandfather. He wore his hair in blond dreadlocks, sported a year-round tan, and almost never wore shoes. The marina was a good little moneymaker for him, and he liked keeping it tolerably shipshape, so his life was complete, as long as he could score his weed. He was kicked back in a La-Z-Boy recliner, listening to some grinding rock.

“Creed! Killer show at the Armadillo last night, man!”

“I saw you on the front row.”

“Yeah, I think you spit on me when you were singing harmonies, man!” He laughed for a good, long while.

“Can I borrow your bike this afternoon?”

“Go for it, dude. I ain't goin' anywhere today. I've got the Thirteenth Floor Elevators on the turntable, man, and I am rockin'!”

“I'll bring you some ribs from The Salt Lick.” Creed grabbed the motorcycle helmet just inside the door and got out of there before he got swept up in more rambling conversation. The key was inside the helmet, as usual. He jumped on the Yamaha, kicked the engine over, and accelerated out of the parking lot, snugging the helmet strap under his chin. Seeing the gas gauge pegged left of empty, he coasted into a Texaco and put two dollars in the tank, almost filling it up.

Twenty minutes later, he had left Austin in his rearview and turned onto Nutty Brown Road in search of Luster Burnett's ranch gate. But what was it that he should be looking for, exactly? Maybe the initials “LB”? Willie had only said he'd know the place when he saw it. There were some fancy stone and wrought-iron estate entrances out here on this road, as if all the rich landowners were trying to outdo one another. He passed an attempt to re-create a Mexican-style hacienda gateway. Creed could only shake his head at the pretentious audacity of it all.

He continued his cruise. And then, as often happened, out of nowhere, some song lyrics began to emerge in his head, like a movie fading in on the screen, complete with a thumping blues/rock audio track.

I had two bald tires on my Harley

Didn't have no job of any kind

My gas gauge pegged left of empty

I was too poor to pay no never-mind

Then I saw you step out of your front door

And I downshifted to the slower lane

Your cowgirl boots and your cutoff jeans

Made me hope my luck was gonna change …

Like his current search down Nutty Brown Road, and his life in general for that matter, he wasn't sure where the song was going. All he knew was that he couldn't use “Yamaha” in a blues rocker, so he had changed it to “Harley.” He shifted gears in time to the groove, but didn't try to force another verse. It would either ripen in time, or die on the vine. Hell, that in itself was a whole 'nother song.

Barreling down the country blacktop, he saw something oddly familiar flash by on his right. Downshifting into a U-turn, he swung around and motored back to the ranch gate he had just past. The gate was simple in contrast to the ostentatious entryways along this stretch of blacktop. It was just an inexpensive aluminum ranch gate you'd buy at the feed store if you made a living on a real, working ranch. Creed knew the manufacturer—Life-Time Gates. He had been schooled not to swing on a Lifetime gate at his grandfather's farm once.

“Get off that gate!” the old man had yelled. “This ain't no playground, and it ain't recess. Now get back to work and don't let me ever catch you swingin' on my gate again!”

This gate was the same type, with six horizontal aluminum bars spanning its length, evenly spaced from the ground up. But someone had made additions to this gate. There were iron discs, from an old disc plow, bolted here and there onto the six horizontal aluminum bars—dots placed on top of lines. To Creed, the horizontal gate members represented strings on a guitar, the plow discs were finger placements. That was a guitar chord, sure as one you might see represented in a book full of guitar chords. And not just any chord, either, but F sharp major. Luster Burnett liked to sing in F sharp, once claiming that the key most perfectly suited the range of his voice. It wasn't a common key in which to play, for most pickers. This had to be the place.

From the gate, the ranch looked like many another typical old-time spread in the Texas Hill Country. A line of scrubby cedar and mesquite trees stood guard behind the seven-strand barbed-wire fence. The mesquites were leafing out bright green this time of year, and an abundance of spring grass seemed available, as opposed to other overstocked ranches Creed had seen. Over the tops of the scrub brush, he could see the domelike crowns of some sizable live oaks, and in the distance, between the live oak crowns, he recognized the tips of some bald cypresses reaching for the sky. Tall bald cypress trees like those had to mean permanent water—Onion Creek, one of the Austin area's most beautiful clear-water tributaries.

Excited to have solved the riddle and found the place, Creed toed the bike into gear, made a stop for ribs at The Salt Lick, and motored on back to his place on the lake. He spent the rest of the day on his houseboat, listening to his scratchy old Luster Burnett discs on the turntable, practicing the guitar parts on a Martin D-28 acoustic, remembering where the vocal harmony parts fell on each song. The parts came back to him easily out of some deeply ingrained place in his mind, long unused. His confidence high, he looked forward to meeting the great Luster Burnett.

 

8

CHAPTER

From the moment he saw her battered body in the morgue drawer, Texas Ranger Hooley Johnson was struck by an almost withering sadness. Corpses were part of the deal in law enforcement. He had grown accustomed to that long ago. But this wanton ruination of youth and life staggered him to the point that he didn't care for his job very much right now. For the first time in a long time, he thought he might actually vomit. Not from the broken human corpse or the autopsy incisions. Just from the sheer loss and waste of a life so young and filled with potential.

Doc Brewster, the Travis County medical examiner, was pointing out his findings from the autopsy: “She apparently was hurled through the glass windshield of a boat…” he was saying, clinically.

Hooley shook his head and sighed, tuning the good doctor out. This girl, Rosabella Martini, had long, black hair. He had seen her photos in the F.B.I. file faxed from Las Vegas. She could have been a fashion model, but it was hard to tell that in her current mangled state. He knew she was educated and accomplished. By all accounts she, and even her father, had taken little if any part in the organized crime ring her uncle ran. She had been a good girl. Her muscle tone told Hooley that she took care of herself; she respected her body. He looked away from her, then made himself look back again. If he was going to get to the bottom of her death, he was going to have to deal with this as an investigator. He would not have this chance to look over her fatal injuries again.

“… so, she didn't drown,” Brewster was saying. “As you can see, she was almost decapitated. The lacerations to the neck suggest a mechanical precision. My guess: a boat propeller at a high RPM.”

“I read your report, Doc. Read between the lines for me.”

Brewster, a stout little man with a thick shock of graying hair, took his glasses off and polished them with his white lab coat. “Usually in a case like this—dead body on the lake, young person, late at night—you'll find alcohol or drugs in the bloodstream. None here.”

Hooley nodded. “All right. What else?”

“She wasn't sexually molested. That's not to say that somebody didn't have that in mind, but it didn't happen. She had her clothes on. Jeans, tennis shoes, T-shirt. I didn't find any bruises on her arms, her wrists, or anything else to suggest she was grabbed or manhandled. You know how it is, when some mean bastard grabs a girl.”

Hooley nodded. “Her F.B.I. file said she had a black belt in karate. Any sign she used it?”

The doctor shook his head. “She had glass cuts on one knuckle, but no sign of any other abrasions.”

“What was it about that glass?”

“Like I wrote in the report, it was plain old glass, not the shatterproof or tempered stuff you find on later models of boats or cars.”

“What year did they start requiring that for manufacturers?”

Doc Brewster shrugged, cautiously. “You'd know that better than I would.”

Hooley frowned and took his tally book out of his shirt pocket. He had learned to carry the notepad from his stepfather, a West Texas rancher from Loving County. Originally intended to keep an accurate count, or “tally,” of cattle on the range, Hooley had found it handy for taking notes and writing reminders.

Flipping to the first open page, he wrote: “Call Glastron.” Austin was headquarters for the Glastron Company, known nationwide as a manufacturer of pleasure boats. They would probably know what year the government began requiring manufacturers to install safer windshields.

He returned the tally book and the pencil to his shirt pocket. “How about the possible projectile wound?”