“Will she make it?”
Stick shrugged. “She’s good, but it takes more than that. It takes luck and timing, the right guy being in the right mood when he hears her stuff. And a lot of the labels are scared right now. Business stuff, mergers and takeovers. Internet downloads. Who knows? And then what have you got to look forward to? Three hundred days a year on the road. Not for me.” He shook his head. “What’s happening with you? Still seeing the lawyer?”
“Off and on.”
“Where did I go wrong with you?” He sounded more like a grieved parent than an old boyfriend. “You know what they say about ten thousand lawyers at the bottom of the sea?”
“Yeah, right, it’s a start.”
“They’re ruining the music, Campbell.”
“That’s funny. You don’t look like your artistic vision’s been stifled—or like someone who’s missed too many royalty payments. I suppose a lawyer checks up on that?”
“Well, sure. I’ve got my lawyer. Everybody in town’s got a lawyer. And you gotta check with them, and they’ve gotta check with each other before anybody hits a lick.”
“You poor thing.”
“Yeah, well, you hang with that lawyer, you always wind up depressed and cryin’.”
I couldn’t argue with that, so I shut up.
The Last Fret is one of the places in Nashville where you can still hear real music. It’s one of the classic listening parlors like the Bluebird Cafe on Hillsboro Road and the Exit/In on Elliston Place, which, as the name seems to imply, keeps coming and going. That’s where you see the real talent—the session players, the writers, the singers who aren’t on the magazine covers yet, or anymore. People who’ve been around town a while talk about a young Jimmy Buffett playing to a nearly empty house at the Exit/In in the early seventies because Elvis was doing one of his last comeback concerts in Murfreesboro. I heard Nanci Griffith at the Bluebird one night when she was unknown, and she blew me away. The shows at the theaters out around the Opryland Hotel are fine, but if you’ve got company from out of town and you want them to see the real Nashville, you take them to the listening parlors. That’s what Branson, Missouri, can’t duplicate.
“What’s that on the napkin?” I asked.
“It’s a song I’m workin’ on,” Stick said.
“Tell me about it.”
“I have this theory that there’s, like, this quantity of love in the world, in the universe. And, like, whenever you do a loving thing for a person, you add to that quantity. Sort of a physics of metaphysics. And when you do an unloving thing—or even miss the chance to love—you diminish that quantity of love for everybody. Kind of like spray deodorant and the ozone layer.”
“I like it, Stick. It’s deep.”
“Yeah. Now, if I can just put it to a beat they can line-dance to, it’ll be a hit.”
“Compromising your artistic vision?”
“Just paying the bills.”
“I hear you. Is Gordy around tonight?”
Gordy Adams is the owner of the Last Fret. He’d been part of Nashville’s music industry before it was a business, much less an industry. He had helped so many people get a start or make a comeback that he had become a legend. Every year the whole business—plus most of the politicians and more than a few Belle Meade socialites—turns out for his birthday. It’s a huge street party on Sixteenth Avenue. He knows everybody who is anybody, or used to be, or might be with the right break.
“Yeah, he’s here. I think he’s in the kitchen makin’ barbecue sauce.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He’s gonna do a guest spot on some cooking show on TV. He’s practicing.”
“Do you think he’d mind if I asked him some questions?”
“I should have known you didn’t come out just to hear the incredible sounds I create.”
I smiled. “That, too. What do you think?”
“Sure. Go on back. Unless the sauce isn’t going well, it’ll be fine.”
Gordy was intensely stirring a huge stockpot full of barbecue sauce while his cooks tried to work around him. The kitchen would begin to wind down soon, though, when all the orders for this break were served. After ten, the bar did a heavier business than the kitchen. I stayed out of the way until Gordy looked up and noticed me.
“Hey, hon. How you doin’? I think this may be the best barbecue sauce I’ve ever made. Wanna try it?”
I’m sure Gordy Adams couldn’t have told you my name, but he knew my face, knew he’d seen me around, knew I was somehow a friend of Stick’s.
“Sure. Stick said you’re going to cook on TV?”
“Yep. Pretty silly. An old geezer like me pretending to be some fancy-schmancy TV cook.”
“I think it’s great.”
“Yeah, well, my wife thinks it’s hilarious. And she’s right. But given the right inspiration and enough time, not to mention a generous supply of Jack Daniels, I can brew a mean barbecue sauce—especially if the judges drink the Jack.”
“It smells delicious.” He passed a spoonful over to me. It was delicious. It reminded me of barbecue I had once in a converted garage in Memphis near the Lorraine Motel. There were picnic tables and a few plastic potted palms in what had once been the service bays, and though I could probably never find the place again, it had the finest barbecue I’ve ever tasted. “It’s great, Gordy, really great.”
“You think so? Maybe, maybe.” He sighed and set down his spoon. “What can I do for you?”
“I just wanted to talk to you a little about Jake Miller, or, rather, listen to you. You knew him, not just the stories about him.”
“You writin’ a book?” Too many exposés and inquiring minds over the years had made Gordy cautious.
“No, no book. Promise. I’m just curious. All the talk about Hazel and Jake.”
“Yep. It seems to be sellin’ a lot of newspapers.”
“What was the real story?”
“Who ever knows what the real story is? Whether you’re outside lookin’ in or right in the middle of it, all you see is what you see. And I’ve always been a little nearsighted. You think there’s a song in that? But anyway, Jake’s drinkin’ had destroyed his first two marriages, that plus bein’ on the road all the time. Well, that plus all the women hangin’ around. And the fact that Jake always did marry the wrong kind of women.”
“What do you mean, the wrong kind of women?”
“I may not be politically correct, but I don’t suppose I’ve ever been too correct about anything else, and it’s too late to change now. But a picker who’s on the road a lot needs a woman who’s solid, one who’s gonna stay home and make it a home to come back to. Otherwise, there ain’t nothin’ there, ’cause you’re out there carousin’, stayin’ up all night, and if you come home and don’t find a real home, something that reminds you of your mama’s and goin’ to church on Sunday, if you come back to a woman who don’t cook and dresses just like the women on the road, well, you might as well be in one more hotel room. Maybe it’s not fair, but that’s the way Jake was. He kept marryin’ flashy women who liked the limelight just as much as he did, so there was nobody at home. Nobody made it a home.”
“Hazel was like that, too, I guess?”
“Well, you’ve seen Hazel Miller. She ain’t changed. She’s no different now—or wasn’t before she died—than she was when Jake first met her. Except maybe she could afford a better class of sequins after Jake died.”
“What kept them together?”
“Well, I suppose Hazel liked the standard of living, and Jake had the grace to die young. But I’m prob’ly not bein’ fair. I can’t imagine they’d be a happily married old couple now if Jake had lived, but there was somethin’ between ’em. It was like electricity when they were together, kind of excitin’ but dangerous, like you weren’t sure which way the sparks would fly, you know? And people who weren’t careful got themselves singed.”
“Sounds like the voice of experience.”
“Not me
. Hazel was never my style. But I was around enough to see a few people get used, wadded up, and thrown away. Hazel and Jake didn’t seem to care who they hurt. It was like they thought everybody understood their rules. And the only rule that counted was, in the end, nobody counted but Jake and Hazel.”
“What happened when Jake died?”
“Don’t know if anybody knows for sure. I don’t. Jake was on the road. He’d been playin’ up in Louisville and was on the way home. Somebody said Hazel had been in the audience that night. Some said no, that’s why Jake was in such a hurry to leave. He wanted to get home to Hazel. Some said it wasn’t Hazel they saw waitin’ in his car, but some new girl, a singer who’d sung backup in some sessions. His lawyer’s the last person who talked to him, as far as anybody knows, except for whoever might or might not have been in the car with him. Someone heard Jake call his lawyer from backstage and tell him he had to see him the next day. If he said why, the lawyer never told. Client privilege.
“Nobody ever admitted to bein’ in the car with him or drivin’ for him—not Hazel or any girl or anybody else, for that matter. You know he died of alcohol poisoning, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“The alcohol in his blood was point-five percent, too high for even Jake to have been conscious, much less drivin’. The car ran off the road, hit a tree somewhere around Horse Cave, Kentucky. Today, they’d test the car for fingerprints, all kinds of scientific stuff, find out how long he’d been dead, stuff like that, but back then it was different. And he might have been Jake Miller, but he was still just another country singer who got himself killed drivin’ home drunk in the middle of the night. Who’d question it? That’s the way it’s supposed to happen.”
“Do you think somebody else was in that car?”
Gordy shrugged. “There were only two beer bottles in that car. If Jake’s blood-alcohol was what they said, I don’t see how he could have driven from Louisville to Horse Cave. And if he was drinkin’ as he drove, there should have been more bottles in the car—and I’d have thought it would have been somethin’ stronger than beer. Two beer bottles? It was the middle of summer. Looks to me like two people, drivin’ along, stoppin’ for a beer on the way.”
“So who do you think it was?”
“That’s the question, ain’t it? I guess only two people know for sure, and at least one of ’em’s been dead for forty years.”
“What about the lawyer? Who was the lawyer?”
“Franklin Polk.”
“And the girl singer. Who was she? Do you know?”
“Not really, but I always figured it was Rosie Layne.”
“Rosie Layne? I never heard her mentioned in connection with Jake.”
“She just did the backup vocals for his last record, and I don’t imagine that rumor about her maybe bein’ in Louisville was too widely known. Besides, it was just after that that she hit it big. Record contract, overnight star, went gold. Her career was bigger than Jake’s by then. Seems to me like Franklin Polk had something to do with her career, too, early on.”
“Thanks, Gordy.”
“Anytime. Hey, let me get a jar. Take some of this sauce home with you. Let me know how it cooks up when you put some meat with it. I’ve made a ton of this stuff. What am I gonna do with it?”
* * *
I waved to Stick and left the Last Fret with a quart of barbecue sauce and a lot to think about. Franklin Polk and Rosie Layne. Kitty Wells might have been the queen of country music, but Rosie Layne ruled the Nashville music industry. The producers and executives on the Row and in New York and L.A. make the decisions that make and break careers, but Rosie Layne is like the British royal family. Gracious, living in a mansion just a couple of doors from Minnie Pearl’s old house and the governor’s mansion, every inch the lady and well dressed except when she’s in costume for now-rare performances. She’s the one who waves to the fans and is kissed by politicians running for reelection. She’s the symbol of traditional country music. It was hard to imagine Rosie Layne as a young groupie singer waiting for Jake Miller at the stage door.
And Franklin Polk. Franklin Polk had been a major contributor to Nashville’s most important—or at least most visible—charities for years. He’s been on several prominent boards and endowment committees. You name it, Franklin Polk is there: the Swan Ball, Children’s Hospital fund-raising, the Performing Arts Center, the symphony. Looking benevolent and relaxed as only a financially secure retired man can, Franklin Polk is always quietly significant. And always elusive.
I had a vague perception that the dean of Nashville attorneys was somehow connected to James K. Polk, eleventh president of the United States and onetime Nashville resident. So many Nashville names can be traced back to the city’s founders and early residents or at least to the gamblers and wheeler-dealers who climbed off the riverboats and stuck around long enough to acquire respectability.
I had never heard Franklin Polk’s name associated with any of the ongoing squabbling over Jake Miller’s estate, though. He must have dissociated himself from the situation long ago, or his name would have been mentioned in the papers now and then. Funny, in a way, because that constant wrangling by the heirs over the estate must have added up to a lot of billable hours for Nashville attorneys over the years. Every so often one of Jake’s previous wives would sue or some would-be would show up in town claiming to be Jake’s illegitimate child or grandchild. Jake’s account must have been a lot more profitable for his attorneys after his death than before. I decided I’d have to call and ask Doug about this one.
* * *
The Loaded Spoon is a really good meat-and-three on the ground floor of an office building a few blocks from the courthouse. I had called Doug the night before, and we’d agreed to meet there for lunch. Doug was waiting at a table in the back when I arrived. He ate while I filled him in on what Gordy Adams had told me. When I slowed down, he looked up.
“Leave it alone, Campbell.”
“How can I leave it alone? The police are calling me. You got me into this.”
“I know.” He looked so uncomfortable that I regretted saying that. “But it’s not my fault you were snooping around the house. On the advice of your attorney, leave it alone, Campbell. Don’t ask questions. Don’t go around telling people you were there that day. Believe me, you don’t want to get mixed up in something like this.”
“I’ll remember that the next time you ask me to go for an afternoon drive.” I picked at my chicken salad. “I knew I should have gone to Aruba for the long weekend. Now, can you find out how Franklin Polk was involved with Jake Miller and his estate?”
“Campbell!” Doug rolled his eyes in exasperation, and I realized that was the closest I had ever heard him come to actually yelling at me—or anyone. “You’re not listening. Drop it. And I didn’t ask you. You asked me. Begged me.”
“Yeah, but it just seems that someone would have talked to Polk, asked him what Jake’s plans were. Did Jake say, ‘Gotta go. Hazel’s waitin’ in the car’? Or ‘See ya later, Frankie. Got a babe out there gettin’ impatient’?”
“Somebody asked Polk those questions years ago. Jake Miller drank himself to death forty years ago. No mystery. Just booze and a car. Next you’ll be telling me Jake and Elvis were standing beside the man who fired the shot from the grassy knoll, and that’s why he’s with Marilyn and Jimmy Hoffa in the federal witness-protection plan.”
“Cute. Really cute. So what have you found out?”
“I’ve found out you don’t have enough to do.”
“Do you mean to tell me you’re not the least bit curious about this? You don’t care about finding out what happened?”
I could see anger in the sudden stillness of his face. Doug and I rarely have confrontations. That’s something neither of us is good at, and we both tend to avoid it. That’s probably a major reason why our relationship has been stuck for so long. Neither of us has had the courage to say it’s time to fish or cut bait.
Do
ug’s lips thinned to a fine, straight line. No wonder he wins so many cases. I knew I wouldn’t want to be on the other side of a courtroom from him. The other side of a plate of homemade chicken salad wasn’t too comfortable as it was. His eyes narrowed, then relaxed as he laughed, a not entirely pleasant sound. I don’t know if the change was because of something he’d seen in my eyes or in himself.
“Okay. You’re right,” he said. “I’m curious. Nobody’s talking much, and that makes me even more curious. Usually, in a case like this, every lawyer and clerk passing through the courthouse has absolute, for-sure, inside information straight from their law-school classmate in the DA’s office or their personal assistant’s best friend who used to work in the Justice Center, whoever. This time, nobody’s heard anything. So, I’m thinking, are they just not talking to me because they’ve heard I was there, or is nobody talking? And if not, why not? Who’s suddenly turned off the spigot to stop the leaks, and how? And why? What’s so important about this case? Isn’t this just about an old alcoholic dying in her sleep? I don’t like it. What is somebody hiding?”
To make a speech that long, Doug had to be really upset. “I’m sorry,” I said.
He looked embarrassed, his eyes focused on the ubiquitous sugar, salt, and pepper arrangement at the side of the table. “It’s not your fault. As you pointed out, I got you into this.”
I reached over and touched his hand. Doug’s never been much of a public toucher, especially not here in a courthouse lunch crowd, so I half expected him to pull away. But he turned his hand over and held mine.
“I’m sorry.” That was the first time Doug had ever apologized to me, actually said the words. He might do all sorts of things to make it up to me when he knew he had hurt me, but he had never said “I’m sorry” before. He still hadn’t looked up. “I don’t like being involved in this, and I wish I hadn’t gotten you involved in it, too.”
“It’s okay.” I realized that I was almost whispering. “It’s okay. It’s been like a game to me. I hadn’t thought about how uncomfortable it is for you being involved in something like this, working around the judges and DAs.”
Your Killin' Heart Page 4
