Denton - 03 - Way Past Dead (25 page)

On page four, buried beneath a two-column story on a zoning committee meeting, was a short piece about this afternoon’s funeral for Rebecca Gibson.

I finished the paper and my coffee, then checked my watch: 9:40. Was Mac Ford doing a Phil Anderson-like dodge on me? Had I become a pariah? I shifted restlessly
on the couch, impatiently flipping through the classifieds, growing more irritated by the moment.

Ten minutes later I stood up and stretched, about ready to blow the whole morning off. Alvy Barnes suddenly rounded the corner upstairs and scooted down the flight of stairs. She stopped on the landing.

“Good, you’re still here,” she said. “I’m so sorry. Mac just got in. I said something to him, but you know how—”

“Yeah, I understand. He still got time to see me?”

“Sure, c’mon.”

I followed her up the stairs and down a long, carpeted hallway on the second floor. While the first floor was a model of decorum and cool professionalism, the upstairs could have been decorated by a graphic designer in the middle of a psychotic break. Splashes of neon paint covered the walls, with movie and rock posters outnumbering country-music posters at least two to one. A stuffed groundhog perched in one corner, with a straw hat planted fashionably on its head and a corncob pipe stuck in its mouth. We passed open office doors with T-shirted agents in jeans and thousand-dollar snakeskin boots making deal after deal. I could hear shouts, arguments, pleas, manipulations. Inside one large office, a Xerox machine painted in desert camouflage clicked away.

“You guys are busy up here,” I commented to the back of Alvy Barnes’s head.

“Oh, this is nothing,” she answered, outpacing me down the hall.

We entered an anteroom that had been converted into Alvy’s office. It was a little more staid than the rest of the floor, but still revealed chaos as the operative mode.

“Wait just a moment,” she said. She walked over to a large heavy door painted bright chromium white and opened it. A cloud of blue smoke drifted out of the crack she’d stuck her head into, along with the booming
rumble of a loud reggae beat. Ford’s office, I surmised, must be heavily soundproofed.

“Mac, he’s here,” I heard her say over the bass guitar and the steel drums.

“Yeah,” Ford yelled, “get him in here!”

I swallowed hard, wondering what I was getting into. Alvy turned, waved me to the door, then held it open for me.

“Go on,” she said. “You asked for it.”

I stepped into a thick cloud of cigar smoke illuminated by the kind of black light fixtures I hadn’t seen since my days as an undergraduate. Alvy shut the door behind me. I squinted in the dim light, my ears aching from the thunderous reggae now confined to Ford’s office. Across the large office, maybe fifteen feet away, Mac Ford sat sprawled out in an office chair beneath an enormous Tiffany lamp with about a ten-watt bulb in it. I squinted to focus. He was on the phone, shouting something into it I couldn’t understand over the music. It was meat-locker cold, the air-conditioning turned up to goose-pimple levels.

Black light counterculture posters covered the wall: Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Avalon Ballroom stuff in that typeface that looked like melting letters and, I’m told although I never tried it, simulated reading under the influence of psychedelics. Ford McKenna Ford, I realized, was a Neanderthal throwback to the Sixties.

And I was locked in his dream.

From behind the haze of thick smoke, he motioned me toward a seat. My nose was closing up and the back of my throat felt scratchy. What was this guy smoking, old socks?

He continued the phone conversation as I shivered in a chair across from him. The Jamaican CD roared on, with the Bob Marley sound-alike wailing away unintelligibly.

I looked around. Clutter, chaos, piles of papers, magazines, framed gold records, photographs. A huge twelve-point buck with a pair of panty hose draped across the horns was mounted on the wall behind him. There were piles of empty Grolsch and Dos XX bottles everywhere, intermixed with discarded Coke cans encrusted with brown goo. A fisherman’s net was suspended from the ceiling with dried Spanish moss hanging down like tendrils. The walls rattled with the energy and the sound. Another minute or so of this and I was going to break a window to escape.

Ford slammed the phone down and said something to me, but I not only couldn’t hear him, I couldn’t see his face through the smoke and the black light well enough to lip-read.

“Could we turn the music down?” I yelled.

He cupped a hand to his ear. Great, I thought, this interview is going just swell.

“Turn down the music!” I yelled again, this time motioning downward in a curve with my right index finger.

He said something like, “Oh, yeah,” and reached for a remote control buried in a stack of junk on his desk. He fished it out, hit a button, and the huge speakers went quiet.

The silence was even weirder.

“You know,” I said, “my landlady’s hearing-impaired. You ought to talk to her about what you’ve got to look forward to.”

“Not a music lover, huh?”

“I’ll let you know when I hear some.”

“Ooh,” he moaned, then laughed. “That’s not going to make you any friends around here.”

“I didn’t come to make friends,” I said. “I came to find out Rebecca Gibson’s secrets.”

“If you do that, they won’t be secrets anymore.”

“What’s it matter to her?”

Mac Ford lodged the thick cigar in an ashtray, then found a bare spot on his desk and drummed it frenetically. He practically leaped out of the chair and circled around me. On a junk-cluttered bookcase, he found a neon hot-pink basketball and bounced it a couple of times on his hardwood floor, then let it fly toward the opposite wall. It bounced off the wall, then rolled around the rim of a basketball hoop he’d mounted above the door to his office. The ball circled the metal hoop three times and rolled off the wrong side.

“No points,” I said. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you’re one of the most frenetic people I’ve ever met.”

That stopped him cold. He recovered the ball and dribbled it a few times, then palmed it and held it against his side.

“I prefer to think of it as dynamic.”

“Could you be a little less dynamic, then? I’m getting dizzy.”

“You know, I’ve already talked to the police. I don’t have to talk to you.”

“I know you don’t. I’ll just repeat what I said yesterday.

Surely you want the real killer to be caught as much as I do.”

“The real killer is caught.” He reached down and scratched his crotch through his jeans.

“Then humor me,” I said. “How much money was Rebecca Gibson going to make over the next year?”

That seemed to catch him off guard. “I don’t know,” he said. He slapped the basketball and did an over-the-shoulder hook shot that missed the hoop by at least a foot.

“Take a guess.”

He grabbed the ball as it careened off his office door. He moved like a sixteen-year-old trying to impress the girl next door. “Anybody’s guess. The new album takes off, she picks up an award or two. Best estimate, maybe a million, million-three, maybe million and a half. Worst estimate, low six figures.”

“What’s your cut of that?”

His nonstop motion ceased for just a moment, and he glared at me, insulted. “My
cut
is whatever salary I take out of this place. MFA Incorporated gets a twenty-percent management fee from all its clients. And, by the way, we work our butts off for that commission.”

“I didn’t say you didn’t. I only ask because I’m trying to gauge how much everyone’s lost.”

“A shitload,” he said. “The world’s lost a shitload.” He flung the ball in a wide arc toward the hoop again. This time, the ball sailed through the net without touching metal.

“Swish!” he called. “She was a great talent.”

“Let’s assume that Slim didn’t kill his ex-wife. If you had a list of suspects that included everyone she knew, who would you pick out of the lineup?”

Mac Ford’s face darkened, although in the dim light it was hard to tell, especially with the two-day growth of beard and the mop of scraggly black hair that draped down over his forehead after that last jump shot.

“That’s a dangerous game, man,” he said. “Unfounded accusations can get you in trouble.”

“Nobody’s accusing anybody. But the way I see it, you’re the second biggest loser in this whole affair. Rebecca Gibson lost her life.”

“Hey,” he said, letting another one fly to the hoop, this one swishing nylon as well. “I’ve still got my health.”

“Minus a pretty good-sized fortune Rebecca Gibson was going to make for you over the next few years.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. He leaned against a wall and scratched at his chin. “The way I see it, nobody benefited financially. We’re all losers. So it had to be revenge or passion or something like that. An old lover. For that matter, a new lover.”

“Would that be Dwight Parmenter?”

“Maybe. If I was checking everybody out, I’d sure add him to the list.”

“Is he one of your clients?”

He snorted. “Dwight? Hell, no. Dwight ain’t got the fire in his belly.”

“But he might have enough fire in his belly to beat Rebecca Gibson to death with his bare hands.”

“Them’s two different kinds of fires, bud.”

“What about this guy Pinkleton? The guy who was her road manager.”

“Yeah, she canned his ass a couple of weeks ago, wasn’t it? She told me she was going to. Said he’d been hitting the nose candy kind of hard and equipment had been disappearing. She figured he was ripping it off and selling it to buy dope.”

“Isn’t that something you would handle? Firing Pinkleton, I mean?”

“Becca was a control freak. I handled her contracts, money, billings, accounting, tour schedules, dealing with the battalion of idiots a major act has to deal with. But when it came down to the nitty-gritty of putting a show together, who played what and when and where
and how loud, Becca did it all herself. Anybody who tried to tell her what to do got slapped down, hard.”

“So you thought she was hard to deal with, too.”

Mac Ford crossed back in front of me and fell back into his chair so hard it rolled back and slammed into the wall behind him. He grabbed the now dead cigar out of the ashtray, then lifted his legs and let them fall with a thud onto the desk.

“You just had to know how to handle her, that’s all. I never had any trouble with her.”

He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a disposable butane lighter, then fired it up and relit the cigar with the three-inch-long flame. He inhaled deeply, taking the smoke into his chest like it was a cigarette, then sighed as he exhaled a stream of blue toward the ceiling. Iron lungs, I guess.

I thought for a moment. “So if you were drawing up a list, you’d put Dwight Parmenter and Mike Pinkleton at the top?”

“Yeah, that’d have to be it. You can take it to the bank, bud; if Slim Gibson didn’t kill Rebecca, then one of them two others did.”

“Is there anything else you can tell me that might lead somewhere?”

He thought for a second. “Nope, that’s about it.”

“Okay,” I said. “I guess that’s all I need for now. Like I say, I’m just following a trail to see where it goes. Thanks for helping me out. Can I call you again if I need anything else?”

“Hey, bud, you call me anytime. Grab one of those cards off the desk. It’s got my home phone number. And you be careful, you hear? Anybody that can beat the dogshit out of somebody as hard as he did Rebecca ain’t going to be shy about doing it again.”

“That’s already occurred to me,” I said.

He didn’t look like he was going to make any attempt to crawl out of that chair, and I didn’t feel like leaning across his desk through the smoke to beg for a hand-shake.
I stood up and pocketed one of his cards, then turned for the door. As I opened it I caught a glimpse of him reaching for the remote control. He punched a button, and this time the room was filled with a raw, rocking beat that had the momentum of a runaway locomotive.

When I closed the door, the roar inside Mac Ford’s office was muffled almost completely. Alvy Barnes sat at her desk, typing something into a computer. She turned and smiled at me.

“Get everything you need?”

“For the time being,” I said.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a couple of business cards. “I meant to give him one of these. Can I leave it with you?”

“Sure.”

“There’s another one there. You keep it. Like I told Mac, I’m just trying to find out anything that will lead me to the truth. If you think of anything that might help, will you give me a call, too?”

She brushed the two cards into the center of her desk drawer. “Glad to.”

“Thanks. It was good to see you again,” I said, turning to leave. “By the way, how does he get any work done in there with all that noise?”

Alvy shook her head. “Beats me. I’ve been working here two years, and he does that every day. He has a great mind, but it works in mysterious ways.”

I walked down the long hallway alone, then down the stairs. Next to the receptionist’s desk, I stopped and listened. I was directly below Mac Ford’s office. Amazing, I thought, these old buildings are really solid.