Not since Jerry Lee Lewis had the people been serenaded by a potential killer; the Ray Jones Country Theater was absolutely sold out, 827 seats, two shows a day, 3:00 and 8:00 P.M. In the meantime, between shows, waiting for the trial, he went on doing what he’d always done, May to November, the last four years, ever since joining the country gold rush to Branson. He hung out with his pals; he played golf on this nice easy course outside his door; late at night, he tried to write songs or rework old material in front of the fixed video camera over there mounted next to the VCR above the TV beside the stereo equipment, in the mahogany built-in with the Mexican doors.
Fewer pals now; mostly just the people who still had business dealings with him. The four guys seated at the round table in his living room at this moment, continuing the stud hand without him, were his manager, Chuck Wagner; his froglike L. A. agent, Milt Lieberson; his scrawny-bearded musical director, Lennie Elmore; and his best friend, Cal Denny, the only one who was there even though he didn’t have to be. The nation’s press—hell, the world’s press—was beginning to camp out at the entrance to Porte Regal, the closest they could get to this house, and a lot of Ray’s fair-weather friends had decided this just wasn’t the right moment to stand up and be counted in his corner. Well, we’ll remember, boys, we’ll remember.
Out this window, beyond the terrace and the wood railing, the lawn sloped gently down to a little skinny artificial stream along his property line, a trickle of water thin enough to step over. Beyond it, the land sloped gradually upward, immediately crossed by a narrow blacktop ribbon of road, just wide enough for the little two-person, two-bag golf carts. And beyond the blacktop was the tee for the thirteenth hole, so there were usually three or four carts parked down there. Five carts now, ten people up by the tee. Interesting how not a one of them looked in this direction; Ray Jones was an embarrassment, just at the moment, in this land of peaceful retirement and Christian privilege.
Or maybe it was the K-9 deputy they weren’t looking at. Once again, a deputy and a sniffer dog prowled this way and that across Ray’s lawn, searching hard, and he knew for what. The messed-up clothes, that’s what. Even the prosecuting attorney over there in Forsyth was having trouble with that 3:00 A.M. fire story. The ashes from Ray’s useless fireplace had been examined, bagged, taken away, and studied by scientists, and they knew the “burned the clothing in the fireplace” story was a crock. They were still hoping, with their sniffer dogs, to find someplace he might have buried the stuff.
Well, good luck, Ray silently told the deputy and his dog, but you got all you’re ever gonna get on me. The question is, Is it enough?
“Hey, Ray,” Chuck called from over at the table. “You in or out?”
“Always in. You know me,” Ray said, turning his back on the golf course and the deputy and the beautiful weather here in Afterlife Village. “Just give me a hand I can play, will ya?”
3
“There isn’t any there there,” opined Harry Razza, standing at the intersection of routes 76 and 165, where, beneath a nonfunctioning traffic light, a brown-uniformed deputy sheriff pinwheeled and pirouetted, directing endless lines of slow and patient pachydermic traffic on and off and along the Branson Strip, where all the theaters and restaurants and family attractions baked in the summer sun.
“That was Winston Churchill, I believe,” Louis B. Urbiton suggested, trying to locate the source of Harry’s quote.
But Harry would have none of it. “Not a bit, old man,” he said. “Lord Mountbatten it was, in re Africa.”
Bob Sangster, the third member of the group, who had been watching the hyperactive deputy out there under the traffic light as though waiting to see him explode, said, “Dorothy Parker. Los Angeles.”
“Nonsense,” Louis B. Urbiton decided, and that was that.
The three men had apparently somehow annoyed their driver, the chap who’d been paid quite handsomely to deliver them from the airport up at Springfield to the Palace Inn in Branson. However it was they’d managed to put his nose out of joint, his revenge had been terrible. Instead of at any hotel at all, he had deposited them here at this intersection, had dumped their luggage from the trunk of his vehicle to the sidewalk, and had departed. And now, without transportation, without a native guide, left alone and friendless at this godforsaken intersection in the middle of the untamed wilds of America, what was to become of the Down Under Trio?
The Down Under Trio, as they were known to their coworkers, were all originally from Australia and had kept their slithery accents to prove it. All had once upon a time been journalists but now were employed by a scurrilous rag called the Weekly Galaxy, headquartered in a section of central Florida that looked—and was—even more godforsaken than this spot here, were that possible. The trio consisted first of Harry Razza, an aging matinee idol with thickly sculptured—and no doubt dyed—auburn hair, a remarkably untrustworthy narrow mustache, and the roguish smile of one who sees himself, despite all the evidence to the contrary, to be quite the ladies’ man. Second, there was Bob Sangster, a rangy, laconic, workmanlike fellow with a large nose and the unruffled manner of a paid-up union member. And finally, there was Louis B. Urbiton, oldest and usually drunkest of the trio, an indefatigable reveler and cutup with a deceptively mature and even bankerish mien.
Though not at the moment, in emergency conditions here at this intersection. “Something must be done,” announced Louis B. as he sensed the bourbon growing warm in the flask in his hip pocket, subjected to all these harmful rays of the sun.
“Ah, yes,” Harry agreed. “But what?”
“That fellow never gets tired,” Bob pointed out, nodding at the metronomic deputy.
The deputy had halted eastbound traffic on 76 to permit a lot of left turns here and there. “Let me see what I can do,” Harry offered, and approached a pickup truck in the stopped line of traffic, its cabin containing a man and a dog—the man driving—its bed empty. The dog’s window was open. Speaking politely to both man and dog, Harry said, “B’pardon. Do you know the Palace?”
Man and dog both glowered, reacting to Harry’s accent. The dog kept his opinion to himself, but the man said, “You a faggot?”
Harry recoiled, his mustache wrinkling. “Are you,” he demanded, “asking me for a date? The cheek!”
The man blinked. “What?”
“Next, you’ll want the dog in with us! What sort of place is this?” Without waiting for an answer, Harry turned about and made his way back to the sidewalk and his two compatriots, saying, “Perverts, would you believe it? In small-town America.”
The deputy had to wave at the man and the dog in the pickup a lot before they got their wits about themselves enough to drive away through the intersection. Meantime, Louis B. said, “Let me try next.”
“Be prepared for a shock,” Harry advised him.
The deputy had now stopped the northbound traffic on 165. Louis B. threaded through the turning southbounders over to a station wagon containing one woman and an indeterminate number of children—somewhere between four and seven. Producing from his clothing one of the many bits of false identification he kept on and about his person, he said, “Madame, I am, as you see, a journalist with the Washington Post, on an important assignment with my confreres over there, to—”
“Police!” screamed the woman.
“We are legitimate journalists, Madame, and—”
“Rape! Assault! Police!”
“Madame, intercourse with you of any kind is the furthest—”
“Children! Help!”
The children rolled down their window and gleefully threw a lot of candy at Louis B., most of it covered with lint. Some stuck to his clothing—for days—but most simply made stains, then rolled to the ground.
“Good day, Madame,” Louis B. said, lifted a nonexistent hat, took a jujube in the eye, and marched with dignity back to the sidewalk. “Not a friendly place,” he informed his team.
“Well, I’ll give it a try,” Bob said. Takin
g from his pocket a twenty-dollar bill, he stepped off the curb and raised both arms high above his head, the twenty stretched between his hands.
Immediately, a six-room mobile home driven by a gent of 127, with his 124-year-old wife in the copilot’s seat, slammed to a halt right next to them. The driver took his teeth from his pocket, popped them into his head, turned a white smile on Bob, and said, “Where you headed?”
“Palace Inn.”
“Climb aboard. You and your pals take the living room. Martha, give the boys some ice water.”
“Hospitality,” Bob murmured, turning over the twenty to the sweet-faced Martha. “It makes the world go round.”
4
And what fresh hell is this?
It wasn’t Sara’s own life that was passing before her eyes with horrid slowness as she edged infinitesimally forward with the rest of the traffic; it was somebody else’s life, someone Sara automatically both pitied and loathed. Nevertheless, Sara felt as though she were the one drowning.
Texans Bob-O-Links. Foggy River Boys. Ride the Ducks? What the hell is Ride the Ducks? Baldknobbers? Presleys? Isn’t he dead? All these signs, all these billboards, all these flashing lights, moving by her car on both sides in sloooooww mo.
The highway from Springfield had emptied Sara here at last, without warning, into the worst traffic jam she’d ever experienced in her life. Campers, pickups, huge tour buses, station wagons, every kind of motorized vehicle known to man—all crept both ways along this narrow, winding ridge road, two traffic lanes and an empty center lane for immediate left turns only, flanked by any number of country-music theaters intermixed with the most appalling examples of family fun: water rides, roller coasters, parachute jumps. Bungee jumping inside a tower. Family restaurants; all you can eat at our buffet. Family motels. Family shows. Family shopping malls. And all of it perched like colorful scavenger birds along the teetery rim of this ridgeline, so narrow that beyond the gauntlet of fun on both sides of the road, the stony land could be seen to fall precipitously away into semidesert, as though God had blasted everything else in the whole world and had left just this one meandering highland line of neon glitz as a reminder of what it was that had teed Him off in the first place.
Sara snailed westward. This endless traffic was like a punishment in a fairy tale; you have to push this vehicle forever with your nose while crows peck at your eyes. No, not crows; there’s nothing black in Branson.
And there’s no such thing as entertainment for the whole family, either.
A traffic light. (The pinwheeling deputy had left an hour ago, the light functioning less entertainingly in his place.) No one, faced with this light, seemed to know what to do next or which way to turn. (That’s why the deputy.) Get on with it, will you?
Through the light. Roy Clark; well, at least it’s a name a person has heard of. And just beyond Roy’s lil ole Celebrity Theatre is the Lodge of the Ozarks, which Trend’s travel person had assured Sara was the only possible place to stay in Branson.
Yes? Modest, discreet, dark wood, no flashing lights, a nice absence of the word family. Encouraging.
In the nice lobby, Sara used her Trend Optima card on the extremely nice lady behind the counter and was just writing her name when an Australian voice behind her said, “Would that be the delectable Sara?”
She turned and, by golly, it was Harry Razza, a coworker of hers from the old days, back when she had been employed by the Weekly Galaxy, the nation’s—probably the world’s—most despicable supermarket tabloid. “Harry!” she said, honestly happy to see the Razzer again. “Of course you’d be here.”
Harry basked in her good fellowship, and they smiled at one another in honest pleasure. He might have an undimmable belief in his winning ways with the fair sex—as he himself would no doubt have phrased it—but he and Sara had gotten all that nonsense out of the way at the very beginning of her time with the Galaxy, and now the sight of him merely brought back those old days of heady irresponsibility, when sneaking a microphone into a television star’s bathroom was the height of journalistic achievement. She could look herself in the mirror these days, an honest and worthwhile human being, a decent citizen, a true investigative reporter for a serious and respectable magazine; but she had to admit, those old days had been fun. The sight of Harry Razza brought it all back.
As did Harry’s next remark: “A terrible place, this, Sara. You must have done something astonishingly wrong in your new employment to be exiled out to these pastures.”
“Come on, Harry,” she said, “we’re both here for Ray Jones, and you know it.”
“Some sort of minstrel, I understand,” Harry said, waving away Ray Jones with a dismissive hand. “Became a bit too enthusiastic in the hayloft; the bint din’t survive.” Casually, he added, “She’s a cousin of Princess Di, you know.”
Sara laughed out loud and accepted her key from the extremely nice lady, who was at this moment sprouting extra ears all over her clean forehead and concrete-permed hair. “Harry, you guys are still the same,” Sara said, picking up her bag. “I’ll see you.”
“Not one place to drink in this hamlet,” Harry informed her. “That’s how horrid it is. We’ve set up a little hospitality suite, you know, just for our friends, over at the Palace. You go out here,” he said, pointing at the door, “turn left, go just one mile through this horror, and you’ll find a cottage inaccurately called the Palace. We’re in Two-two-two. Easy to remember, yes?”
“Very easy,” Sara agreed.
Harry stepped closer, lowering his voice, looking serious and concerned. “I’ll tell you how bad this place is,” he murmured. “They have an Australian restaurant. Could you believe it? With oysters.”
“That doesn’t sound bad.”
“Look about you, Sara,” Harry advised. “Do you see an ocean?”
“You may be right,” Sara said. “See you later, Harry.”
“Don’t forget. Two-two-two.”
“I’ll remember,” Sara assured him, then went up to her standard-issue motel room, neat and inert. Having unpacked, she phoned Jack Ingersoll, her editor back in New York, to say, “While checking in, I ran into Harry Razza.”
“Oh, good old Harry,” Jack’s voice said in her ear. Jack, too, had worked for the Galaxy at one time, where he’d been both Sara’s and Harry’s editor. “Did he try to get you drunk?”
“Apparently that’s difficult in this town. No major hotel with a bar, no airport with a bar, nothing central and useful. So the Galaxy’s set up a hospitality suite at one of the other motels. The Down Under Trio’s out rounding up the nation’s press.”
“Go over there,” Jack said.
Surprised, Sara said, “What? Why? You know what they’re up to; it’s the same stuff they used to do for you.”
Which was to eliminate the competition. Given a story like the upcoming Ray Jones trial, the Galaxy would undoubtedly flood the area with anywhere from fifty to a hundred reporters and photographers and sneak thieves, and the task of the Down Under Trio was to distract, befuddle, and snooker the rest of the press, thus hobbling the world of journalism with booze and disinformation like the Princess Di gambit, while keeping all actual scoops and sidebars and juicy tidbits in the story for themselves; that is, for their team at the Galaxy. Sara might once have been a coworker of Harry Razza’s, but today she was a rival, so why would Jack want her to fly into the Galaxy’s web?
“Because,” Jack explained, “they need stuff for this week’s paper, and you don’t. You are there to study the whole scene, to do a think piece and a summing-up after it’s all over. And what’s going to be a big part of that scene, all along the way? The Weekly Galaxy.”
“Ah,” Sara said, following the idea. One concept that Jack had retained from his days on the Galaxy was that the story is never really the story. The story is just the doorway that lets you get inside and find and cover the real story, the story you want to cover. So Jack had just nosed out one possible story, which was not, in fact,
the upcoming murder trial of country singer Ray Jones but was—surprise, surprise—the Weekly Galaxy. In the past, Trend had tried and failed to do a Weekly Galaxy exposé; maybe this was the time.
This could be fun, Sara thought, and said, “Two-two-two.”
“Right you are,” Jack said, misunderstanding.
5
After a late lunch with some state legislators over in Branson, Warren Thurbridge drove back to the defense team’s offices in Forsyth, the county seat, and when he walked in, Jim Chancellor was standing there, a lot of computer printout in his hands. He had good news, and he had bad news. “We’ve got our first jury lists. We can go over them now,” he said. “The phone company’s at work in your office, so maybe we should use the conference room.”
“Phone company?” Warren didn’t like that; everything was supposed to be done and ready to go. “What for?”
“Beats me,” Jim said. He was a local attorney, under forty, amiable, chunky, with a good sport’s thick black mustache. “They just said there was a little glitch.”
Warren, frowning massively, strode to his office, stood in the doorway, and there they were, a man and woman, both in plaid shirts and jeans and work boots, both wearing white hard hats with the word CONTEL on the side, both lumbered with big heavy tool belts jangling and dangling with equipment. They had Warren’s desk shoved out of the way and were doing something to the spaghetti of phone wires at the baseboard along the back wall. While the man went on working with a small screwdriver, the woman, apparently sensing the weight of Warren’s glare on her back, turned, smiled brightly, and said, “Just a couple more minutes.”
Jim stood behind Warren, outside the room. “We can use the conference room, Warren,” he said. He was new at saying “Warren,” and it came out a trifle lumpy.
Baby, Would I Lie? Page 2
