Die Laughing: 5 Comic Crime Novels

by Steve Brewer

  The phrase ‘published song writer’ began to sink into Whitney’s consciousness. He decided it was more than just a little progress. It might be just the break he needed. “Well, so I get paid for my song being on the record, right? I mean, how’s that work?”

  “Way it works is simple,” Big Bill said. “You’re gonna make what’s called a mechanical royalty for every one of Eddie’s records that gets sold. Of course by law, mechanicals get split with the publishing company.”

  “That’s what you got set up through your business, right?”

  “That’s right,” Big Bill said, pointing back and forth between the two of them. “We’ve got what’s called a co-publishing agreement between you and our company, just like we talked about. But that ain’t all. See, on top of the mechanical royalties, you’ll also get paid a little sumpin’ every time your song gets played on the radio.” Big Bill leaned toward Whitney. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if your song is the third or fourth single we release.” He sat back and shot Whitney a can-you-believe-it look.

  Whitney smiled for the first time since Big Bill sat down. “Are you kiddin’ me? Well, damn, that’s great.” Whatever disappointment he felt about not being the artist was overpowered by the feeling he got from hearing his song might get released as a single and that he was going to get paid for it to boot. Whitney felt a surge of confidence and looked at Big Bill. “Well, let me ask you about something else, Mr. Herron, I was wondering when I might get that signing bonus we talked about?”

  An exaggerated look of disappointment suddenly clouded Big Bill’s face. “Oh, shoot! Talk about bad timing, I forgot to tell you. The day you signed your contract, my damn accounts payable department switched to a ninety day pay cycle. I’m real sorry, I should’ve told you sooner, but I just forgot, I been so busy out trying to sell your songs and all.” Big Bill pulled out his money clip and peeled off fifty dollars. “Here, lemme give you this,” he said. “We’ll consider it an advance on what we owe you.”

  51.

  In order to accommodate Eddie Long’s debut disc — Long Shot — Big World Records pushed back the street dates for a dozen of their established acts. They also redirected a significant percentage of the marketing budget from each of those projects to make a huge media push on Eddie’s record. The managers of the bumped artists were so mad they couldn’t spit straight and the artists themselves, understandably more concerned with their own careers than that of the latest ‘It Boy,’ were fit to be tied. In public, of course, every one of them talked about how excited they were to have such an exciting young talent on their label and how they were looking forward to the record and how the business was all about honoring the music and no, they weren’t at all concerned about the delay in their own release date, not in the least. Don’t be silly. No point in speaking your mind and running the risk that the label give you shorter shrift than they already have. Oops, did I say that out loud? What I meant was, shucks, I’m just glad to be with Big World Records.

  Meanwhile Big World had to solicit sales at the wholesale level in order to determine how many units of Long Shot to produce on the first run. Thanks to the extensive trade magazine coverage and the Internet buzz, the demand was astounding. Based on orders, Big World could have set the initial run at a million units. But Eddie had other ideas. He convinced the label to try a high-risk marketing strategy. And damned if they didn’t buy it. They set the first run at three hundred fifty thousand units. It was enough to ensure they got at least a few of Eddie’s discs into just about every outlet in the country, from truck stops to Wal-Marts to Sam Goody’s but, at the same time, it almost guaranteed that not everyone who wanted the disc would get it right away.

  Eddie’s thinking was that an initial under-supply of product would increase demand by creating in consumers a sense of urgency for buying the product immediately, whereas an over-supply would tend to make people think there was no hurry to go buy it. The strategy was designed to create Beanie Baby-like hysteria in record stores. Naturally Big World’s marketing department would arrange to have television crews there to record the madness. The footage would be broadcast on the news and would create interest in the record for consumers who otherwise never would have considered buying it. As Eddie explained it, “When you see fifty people fighting in the aisles over something, you start thinking to yourself, ‘Shit! I need to get me one of those!’”

  When the head of marketing asked how Eddie could be sure such a group of people would break into a fight when a television crew was at a store, Eddie just smiled and said, “Temps.”

  Before starting on the Long Shot disc, the duplication facilities cranked out a few thousand copies of ‘comp’ singles for radio and shipped them overnight. The album version of ‘It Wasn’t Supposed To End That Way’ was also made available as an MP3 file for any station with MP3 capability.

  The last piece of the marketing puzzle was put together out at Willow Street Studios. Eddie knew as well as anyone that it was possible to sell a country artist without a music video, but it wasn’t very smart. They shot it in two days. The set was the interior of a modest home, presumably Eddie’s. All the furniture was covered in sheets and the walls showed the shadows where pictures used to hang. Eddie wore black, befitting a man in mourning. They shot him as he wandered through the house, sitting on the arm of the covered sofa, touching the wall where a cherished photo had hung. All the while Eddie played his guitar and sang. Most of the video was shot from a voyeuristic point of view as the camera followed Eddie and caught glimpses of his face from a respectful distance. But about two thirds of the way through, as he sat at the foot of the bed, looking down at his guitar, the camera pushed in and Eddie slowly looked up all sweet and sad as he reflected on the unexpected loss of someone he had once loved. And then, with what looked like a tear in his eye, he sang the words, ‘it wasn’t supposed to end that way.’ It just broke your heart.

  Country Music Television and The Nashville Network put the video in heavy rotation immediately and ‘It Wasn’t Supposed To End That Way’ became the ‘most added’ song on country radio its first week out. It debuted at #7 on both Billboard and R&R Country charts and put Eddie Long on the map.

  52.

  Jimmy was in his kitchen having breakfast and reading the paper. After glancing at the news and sports, he turned to the Southern Style section where he was blindsided by a photograph. The cup of coffee stalled on its way to Jimmy’s lips. “That cocksucker.” It was all Jimmy could say as he stared at the paper. It was the photo of Eddie and Megan that had run in Billboard, the one taken at the Vanderbilt Plaza the night Eddie signed his record deal. And now it was running in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger along with a story about how another Mississippi boy had gone to Nashville and hit the big time. The caption read, in part, ‘. . seen here with his girlfriend, former Jackson radio personality, Megan Taylor. . .’ “That cocksucker,” Jimmy said again.

  While he could have been referring to Megan with a literal use of the pejorative noun, he was actually using it in the figurative sense and was thinking of Eddie when he said it. It didn’t matter that Megan was draped all over Eddie in the photo, Jimmy still hadn’t gotten over her. He blamed Eddie for stealing her from him.

  The Clarion-Ledger story said Long Shot had sold 350,000 units in its first week, making it the best selling record in the country. In fact, according to the article, a near riot broke out at one store in Atlanta when a group of customers started fighting over the last copy of the disc. There was even a photo of the event. It looked like fifty amateur wrestlers throwing punches and pulling hair. It was the sort of PR you couldn’t buy — well you could, actually. In fact, not only could you buy it, you could choreograph it too. Jimmy could see Eddie’s fingerprints all over the stunt. He might be a cocksucker, but he knew marketing. The story and the photo had been picked up by half the papers in the country and it was helping make Eddie Long the hottest thing out of Mississippi since Faith Hill.

  Ironically, it was j
ust the break Jimmy needed. Energized by a combination of jealousy and aspiration, he spent the rest of the day and night at his computer working on a book proposal for The Long and Short of It — The Unauthorized Biography of Eddie Long. Jimmy already had several sample chapters, so all that was left was to finish an outline for the remainder of the book and put together a section on audience and marketing. Knowing he couldn’t submit the proposal directly to publishers, Jimmy wrote a query letter then pulled out his directory of literary agents and started addressing envelopes. By midnight he was at Kinkos making copies.

  Jimmy stood by the machine as it hummed and rocked and spit out the warm, collated sets of documents. It was a good proposal on a hot subject, but he was having second thoughts. He wondered if he should go back and rewrite it to include his speculation that Eddie killed Tammy. What else could he think? The MSG in the Chinese food from a restaurant that didn’t use MSG indicated that someone else had to put it in the boxes with the leftovers. The fact that Tammy was MSG intolerant, which meant it probably gave her headaches. And the fact that the only headache remedy in their house was poisoned. Add to that Carl’s claim that Eddie felt Tammy was holding him back and it was just too much to shrug off.

  But while all that seemed to point at Eddie, there was still the matter of the troublesome evidence pointing elsewhere. The gunshot wound, for example, remained unexplained. Eddie obviously couldn’t have done that since he was on the Gulf Coast at the time. And then there was Carl’s comment about Tammy’s affair with a man from Grenada. Maybe something had gone wrong there and this mystery lover was the one with blood on his hands.

  Jimmy mulled all this over on the drive home and decided not to include his theory about the identity of Tammy’s killer. Sure, it would have made for a more titillating proposal, but he had no proof, only circumstantial evidence. He figured publishers would see that as the easy road to a hard lawsuit and who needs that headache? No, he’d leave the proposal as it was, hoping to sell it on the merit of his writing and the fact that Eddie was heading for stardom. Meanwhile, Jimmy had to return to Hinchcliff to look for some direct evidence. Then maybe he’d go to Nashville and confront Eddie with his theory. Or Megan.

  Back at his apartment, Jimmy glanced again at the picture in the Clarion-Ledger. Seeing Megan and Eddie together hurt the way betrayal always did. But he took comfort in the fact that now he knew where he stood with Megan. Now he knew it was a matter of trying to win her back and, ironically, Eddie’s sudden success looked like it might be the thing to allow Jimmy to do just that — especially if he could prove the cocksucker was also a murderer.

  53.

  “I’m cooter than Drunker Brown!” the man hollered, half laughing. “And I wannanuther beer!”

  The bartender shook his head and looked at the clock. It wasn’t noon yet. “Go home, Chester. I ain’t serving you no more.”

  Chester Grubbs didn’t seem to hear the bartender and, for the moment, he seemed to forget that he wanted another beer. His attention span had suffered as much as his liver from three decades of drinking. Not that he was always this drunk this early in the day. His drinking spells came and went. He’d go on a high lonesome for a while, then he’d hit bottom, straighten up for a month, get some half assed job doing shit work for shit wages, then he’d start drinking again, do something stupid and get fired. This circle had remained unbroken for thirty years.

  Chester was sitting in a juke joint on a back road outside Broken Bow, Oklahoma. Over the years he’d been in similar road houses in Texas, California, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and maybe a few other states, he wasn’t sure. He just moved around, hoping to remain anonymous until he died. Chester had screwed up his life and he knew it. No point in arguing with the truth, he’d say. Better just to keep out of its way.

  Chester looked harder than two summers in hell. His face was all dirty crags and dull gray whiskers and there was something about the trouble in his eyes that made it look like he’d spent more time in jail than he really had. It was hard to say if he was a fifty year old who’d aged badly or a seventy year old who looked pretty good for his predicament. A long time ago Chester had a lot of promise. But he hadn’t kept the promise and the guilt gnawed at him.

  That’s what first got him to drink too much. Guilt over things he’d done and things he’d failed to do. Then of course it was guilt over things he forgot he did until someone reminded him the next day. After enough of those nights he’d have to move on and find somewhere else to drink.

  “Hey!” Chester yelled again. “I said I wannanuther beer!” He threw his empty bottle across the room. It broke against the wall.

  And that was all the bartender would tolerate. “Goddammit! That’s it,” he said. “You’re eighty-sixed, you sorry-ass drunk.” He pointed at the door. “Get outta here!”

  “I just wannanuther beer.” He sounded pathetic.

  “I said get out!” The bartender stormed around the bar, grabbed Chester by the belt and collar, and forced him out the door.

  Chester put up a drunk’s fight on the way. “I didn’t come here and I ain’t leavin’!” he yelled as the bartender threw him into the dirt. Chester pulled his head up and spit a small rock. His mouth was muddy where the dirt had mixed with beer and spit. He rolled over and yelled at the sky, “And I want my money back!”

  54.

  Eddie was on the phone with the program director of WUSN-FM in Chicago making promises he intended to keep. “I swear! I will do your morning show,” he said. “I will play at your listeners’ party, whatever you want. I love you guys!” Earlier that morning Eddie had made pretty much the same promises to the program directors at KYCY-FM, San Francisco; WXTU-FM, Philadelphia; KPLZ-FM, Dallas-Fort Worth; and WYCD-FM in Detroit. “Yeah, we’re on our way to New York. I’ll have my assistant call when we get in and make the arrangements.” By the time the plane landed, Eddie would have spoken to eight or ten more country stations in the top twenty markets. He looked out the window at mid-America and wondered if someone down there was listening to his song when the program director asked him a question. “Sure, I’d be glad to,” Eddie said. “Is tape rolling? Hey everybody, this is Eddie Long and you’re listening to WUSN-FM!” He couldn’t have been happier.

  Neither could Megan. She loved flying first class. She was made for it. Prior to take off, she sat there, casually flipping through Architectural Digest, periodically casting a disdainful eye over the top of the magazine at the coach class fliers as they filed past. Yeah, that’s right, I’m somebody. Now move along, you’re slowing the champagne service.

  The members of ‘Team Long Shot’ were living a rare dream. ‘It Wasn’t Supposed To End That Way’ had gone from number seven to number four in its second week. And now, in its third week, it was the number one song on country radio. The reviews were sparkling, four-stars, pick-of-the-week, pre-ordained Album-of-the-year. Many of the reviewers commented on the remarkable overall sound of the record, “Like nothing you’ve heard in years,” one reviewer wrote, “as full, rich, and warm as a living room guitar pull.” It was on all 149 of the top country stations reporting to Radio & Records and was getting spins on roughly 2,300 of the 2,500 country stations in the US. The album had sold a total of 620,000 units in just under three weeks, the media requests were pouring in, and Eddie’s accounts receivable were getting fat in a hurry.

  Big Bill, Franklin, Megan, and Eddie were on their way to New York for three days to kick off a national media blitzkrieg. In addition to six magazine features and three newspaper interviews, Eddie was scheduled for Good Morning America and Late Night with David Letterman. Then he had to do the morning show on New York’s number one country station, WYNY-FM.After New York they were headed for Dallas to start a thirty-five city tour in support of his album. The tour would take them to Los Angeles where he would do the Tonight Show, as well as Entertainment Tonight, and Access Hollywood. He’d also meet with several film agents interested in looking at him with an eye tow
ard roles in upcoming features. After that, Eddie started a thirty-five city tour in support of his album.

  Megan was next to Eddie, in the aisle seat, tickled pinker than a salmon. Two days earlier, still in Nashville, Big Bill had called to tell them Long Shot had been certified gold and was on track for platinum status. Being the kind of girl who adhered to the old adage, ‘them that don’t pluck, don’t git feathers,’ Megan rushed out to buy some champagne before returning to pluck Eddie’s lights out. Afterwards, with Eddie lying next to her sweetly drunk and satisfied, Megan picked up the phone, dialed the radio station, and quit her job. Then, gently stroking Eddie’s champagne flute, she convinced him that the smartest and sweetest thing he could do right then was get Big Bill to hire her.

  “I’ll be your road manager and your personal assistant,” she said as she began kissing his chest. “You need somebody to schedule all the media stuff and coordinate with the travel agents and the promotion people and the label. And you don’t want Herron and Peavy doing it. You want them out making deals.” Megan’s kisses began migrating south as she continued her pitch. “I’m perfect for the job.” She kissed his stomach, making it quiver. “I’ve got radio credentials and I know enough about the record business and concert promotion. And besides. . .” She gave little Eddie a kiss on the head. “I take dictation.”

  Eddie smiled as he looked down at Megan. He was as drunk on his newfound fame as he was on the champagne. In fact, his hat size had probably doubled in the last week. “Why don’t you go ahead and finish what you’re doing,” he winked, “and I’ll see what I can arrange.” He grabbed the phone and dialed. “Hey, big buddy, just wanted to call and thank you for hiring my new assistant.”