Baby, Would I Lie?

by Donald E. Westlake

  “I don’t like it, Ray.”

  “That’s okay, Jolie. Just do it.”

  So she just did it, frowning massively all the way, and that meant, at 11:00 A.M. on Saturday, with the world outside a massed and colorful chorus of tourists in polyester, Ray and Jolie entered the Table Rock Dam substation offices and were shown to Leon “The Prick” Caccatorro’s lair, where Leon himself awaited them like a vampire.

  Leon “T P” was a cadaverous man in his forties who wore his dead father’s dark suits, cut down to more or less fit. He wore his father’s white shirts, too, and his father had had twice the neck of Leon “T P,” so behind the tight knots of his father’s wide dark ties, the old frayed white cloth could be seen to bunch and pucker, well in front of T P’s Adam’s apple.

  This apparition’s bat cave, on the second floor of the substation offices, somehow never seemed to draw the sun. There were three rooms set aside here for T P and his crew of three: The Prick’s own den, an outer reception office, and a small conference room. The other three members of The Prick’s gang were a secretary, an accountant, and a guy who stood around a lot, maybe waiting for a bus, but none of them mattered. Only Leon “T P” Caccatorro himself mattered.

  The Prick ushered Ray and Jolie into the conference room, where they all sat around the oval table, The Prick and the accountant on one side and Ray and Jolie on the other. The secretary stayed in the reception office, and the other guy was somewhere around, waiting for a bus.

  Jolie got the ball rolling: “Ray here, as you know, doesn’t have much of a business head. That’s how he got into this mess in the first place, taking bad advice from people who should have known better. So he’s let me try to handle the situation for him, but you know he’s got other problems as well—”

  “We know,” Leon “The Prick” acknowledged.

  “And I think it’s getting to him,” Jolie said. “So he wanted to come here today, meet with you, find out exactly what the situation is.”

  “It’s a quite simple situation,” T P said. “Ray Jones owes the government money, and the government wants it.”

  “Well, it’s not quite that simple,” Jolie said. “Let’s not go back to square one here. On the one side, we’ve got the original indebtedness, plus judgments, interest, and penalties, all still piling on. On the other side, we have reality.”

  T P’s lips moved in what might have been a smirk. “And what,” he asked, “is reality?”

  “Ray Jones is finite,” Jolie said. “He has only so much money; he has only so many more songs in him; he has only so much life expectancy. The government, speaking realistically, is never going to get the full amount of tax owing, plus interest, plus penalties, and you know it as well as I do. The question is, then, What will the government accept as full recompense, and in what form will the government accept that recompense?”

  Ray said, “Jolie? What do you mean, what form? Money’s money, isn’t it?”

  “Copyrights in songs are an asset,” she told him. “Royalties, future royalties from past records, that’s another asset. Royalties from performance of your songs by other artists, that’s another.”

  T P added with ghoulish relish, “Box-office receipts from your theater. Product-endorsement payments.”

  “Don’t have any of those right now,” Ray said.

  “You have had in the past,” T P reminded him. “Beer, at one point, I believe, and wasn’t it sausage?”

  “And the Interstate Bus Company,” Ray said. “They’d be real distressed if you forgot that one.”

  “I won’t forget anything, Mr. Jones,” T P said, and smiled that smile again. His teeth were small and narrow and crooked, but they looked sharp.

  Ray felt Jolie’s warning eye on him, and he didn’t respond anymore, just sat back and nodded and tried to look like a sober businessman. The conversation went on without him, mostly Jolie and T P batting it back and forth, with occasional footnotes from the accountant, and what it all came down to was: Ray Jones’s money, for the purposes of this discussion, separated into three categories. First, there was money still coming in on songs he’d already written and/or recorded, and small residuals from reruns of TV shows he’d been on. Second, there was whatever money he was earning right now, at the theater in downtown Branson and through his Best Hits album sales on late-night TV. And third, there was future income, from those first two sources and also from any new songs Ray might take it into his head to write and/or record.

  The difference between Jolie and T P was that Jolie wanted to pay the government mostly out of the first category of money, earnings derived from the past, with a little topping up of the tanks for a while from present earnings, while T P wanted a part of anything Ray might do in the future. In Jolie’s plan, in other words, which Ray liked insofar as he could like anything to do with this cock-up, the government would get half a loaf and then be out of Ray’s hair forever. In T P’s plan, the government would be in his pocket for all eternity, his partner. The impasse was caused, on the one side, by Jolie and Ray’s absolute refusal to let the government be Ray’s permanent partner and, on the other side, by the government’s greedy belief that the real gold was in them thar future hills. Until T P could be distracted from the future by a demonstration that the past would eventually generate enough income to satisfy the bulk of the debt, the impasse would continue.

  As it did today, for close to an hour, back and forth, Jolie and T P clearly disliking one another but both being formal, both finding endless ways to restate the same old positions, endless ways to try to make the same old positions sound like new positions, like compromises of some sort. Round and round the maypole they went, and then Ray decided it was time to make his move. “Leon,” he said, “let’s cut through the crap, okay? Mind if I call you Leon?”

  “Not at all,” Leon said, squinting and showing those sharp little teeth.

  “I’ll put you a proposition,” Ray said.

  Jolie, alarmed, said, “Ray? We haven’t discussed this.”

  “That’s okay, Jolie,” Ray said, giving her a look of exasperated sincerity. “But none of you people’s getting anywhere, and this whole thing’s running me down. It’s bad publicity, for one thing, on top of the bad publicity about the trial, and I’ve had enough bad publicity; it’s gonna hurt me with the fans. And it’s buggin me, too, goin on for years, affecting how I sleep, how I eat, how I digest my flapjacks.”

  Jolie said, “Ray, for God’s—”

  “No, Jolie,” Ray said. “That’s why I wanted this meeting, get myself an idea when this thing is gonna be over, and I can see right now, the way it’s going, it ain’t never gonna be over.” Looking at T P, Ray said, “It ain’t ever gonna be over because you can’t go into court and enforce a judgment against me while we’re still in this bullshit good-faith negotiation, because if you could go into court and whomp me, you’da done it last year. You wanna correct me on that, Mr. Leon?”

  “The government is patient,” T P said.

  “I know it is,” Ray said. “And I know I’m not, but that’s why I hire a whole passel of people that are patient by profession. People like Jolie here. So here’s my proposition. You people all talk about money from the past and money from the future, right?”

  “Essentially,” T P agreed.

  “So here’s my offer,” Ray said, “and it’s a onetime deal, the last offer you’re gonna get that isn’t bullshit string-’em-along stuff. You can have fifty percent of one or the other.”

  Jolie looked as though she’d just been shot in the forehead. T P floundered, then said, “I’m not certain I know what you mean.”

  “Fifty percent of money that comes from the past,” Ray said, “or fifty percent of money that comes from the future. You pick.”

  “By future,” T P said, “you mean any new song you might write, anything that is not as of this date copyrighted?”

  “Right.”

  “Plus future income from the theater and record sales?” />
  “But only on those future songs,” Ray said. “Royalties on old copyrights, that’s the other kind of money.”

  “But a new album, containing a mix of old and new songs, would generate new money, would it not?”

  “Sure, throw that in, too. If that’s what you want the fifty percent of, fine.”

  “Ray!”

  “Shut up, Jolie.” To T P, Ray said, “Or you could go the other way. Money that comes in for anything I did before a certain time, before … well, pick a date. I tell you what. July twelfth. The day Belle Hardwick went down. If that’s the way you decide to go, then any money at all that comes in on stuff I did before the twelfth of July this year, you get half of it. Simple, clear, something a country boy like me can understand.”

  T P had a canary feather stuck in the corner of his mouth. He licked it away and said, “I’ll have to check with D.C. on Monday, of course, but if that’s the proposal that you and your advisers agree on—”

  “It’s the proposal I agree on,” Ray said grimly. Beside him, Jolie had turned into a mountain of marble awaiting a sculptor, but that was okay. Ray had his own agenda here, and it was all going according to plan.

  “Then I don’t see why,” T P said, smirk now in plain sight, “sometime in this coming week we can’t come to an agreement.”

  “Good. Get this thing out of the way.”

  “Choose the one,” T P said, and giggled a little, “or choose the other.”

  “Just let me know which,” Ray said. “But remember, I’m serious about this. This is the last shot. We come to an agreement on this now or I’ll stonewall you forever. I’ll cost the government millions just to hire file clerks to pack all the paper away; my grandchildren will stonewall your grandchildren. It’s now or never, and I mean it.”

  “I don’t see any problem at all with your proposal,” T P said.

  “We’re gonna have a deal? Guaranteed?”

  “I still must check with D.C.,” T P said, “but I think I can guarantee, within the parameters you’ve just given, we will definitely have a deal.”

  “When?”

  “I should think by the middle of the week,” T P said, “we could be generating the paperwork.”

  “Just tell me where to sign,” Ray said, and got to his feet. T P also rose, wiping his right palm on his father’s pants, but Ray didn’t offer to shake hands. “I won’t take up any more of your valuable time,” he said, deadpan, and turned to say, “Jolie? You ready?”

  Jolie struggled into consciousness from a coma. She stared numbly at Ray, then at the preening T P, then at last heaved herself to her feet and silently followed Ray from the conference room and from the building.

  It was as they were approaching the Jag, parked in bright sunlight amid the tourists’ campers, that Jolie found her voice. “Do you know,” she demanded, “Ray, do you have any idea, what you just did in there?”

  “I cut through the bullshit.”

  “You gave away the store!”

  “I gave away half the store,” Ray corrected. “No, half of half. I can live with that. Whichever way he picks.”

  “Whichever way? The one thing we’ve been trying to do, for months now, more than anything else, is keep the feds away from future earnings, and you just handed them future earnings! On a silver platter! Months of negotiation down the drain!”

  “Well, we’ll see,” Ray said. “Come on, I’ll buy you lunch. Or are you dieting again?”

  29

  “What’s going to happen to Binx?” Sara asked.

  Jack looked at her in surprise. “Binx? Why should anything happen to Binx?”

  It was Saturday night and Sara and Jack were having dinner at the Candlestick Inn, where she’d been Thursday with Binx, so that hapless fellow had been intruding into her thoughts the entire meal. She said, “Well, he’s the one we’re going to expose, isn’t he? Him and his team?”

  Jack snapped a bread stick as though it were Binx’s neck. “So?”

  “So what if they fire him?”

  “They fire everybody,” Jack said. “Sooner or later, they fire everybody.”

  “I know, I know,” Sara said, tired of that excuse, “but when they fire everybody else, I’m not responsible.”

  Jack put down the halves of his bread stick. “You’re responsible for Binx Radwell? Responsible for his life? Responsible for his decisions?”

  “No, of course not,” Sara said, frustrated and helpless. It didn’t help to be told her guilt feelings were irrational. All guilt feelings are irrational, in that with sufficient sophistry all actual guilt can be reasoned away, but so what? Sara didn’t want to bury her sense of shame toward Binx; she wanted to wallow in it, and she wanted Jack to wallow in it, too, and the bastard just wouldn’t cooperate. “The only thing is,” she said, still hoping to explain herself somehow, break through his leather skin somehow, make him feel bad somehow, “we all used to be friends, in the old days, Binx and us.”

  “That’s the way you remember it, eh?” Jack smiled at her. “That’s nice.”

  “All right, we had friendly competition,” Sara said, and Jack laughed out loud, and Sara hated him, but had to grin and duck her head and say, “Oh, all right.”

  She pretended to eat for a couple of minutes, aware of Jack’s eyes on her but determined to say not another word on that or any other subject, and then Jack said, “Two things.”

  She looked up at him, expectant. Two things was two things more than she’d anticipated. “Yes?”

  “The story is two stories,” Jack told her. “I was on the phone with Hiram again this afternoon, and we’ve agreed on that. The Weekly Galaxy is one story and the Ray Jones murder trial is a different story.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “It means I’m going to do the Weekly Galaxy story,” Jack said, “so if any rain falls out of that cloud onto Binx’s head, it’s my fault and not yours, okay?”

  “That helps,” she admitted. “Not a lot, but some.”

  “So that means,” Jack said, “you’re doing the Ray Jones trial story as the Ray Jones trial story—country celebrity on trial in a country setting.”

  “Good,” she said. “I can do that, no problem.”

  “Just go a little light on the salt-of-the-earth stuff, okay?”

  “I won’t mention gingham once,” she promised.

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “You said two things,” she reminded him. “Was that both of them?”

  “No. The other thing, I didn’t know when exactly to tell you.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Not that bad,” he said, and grinned at her. “We’re still the dynamic duo.”

  “The unholy two.”

  “Now and forever. However, Hiram says I gotta go back.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  The feeling that came over Sara now was much more real and much harder to take than her crocodile guilt over Binx Radwell. She’d enjoyed having Jack around, enjoyed sharing with him her reactions to this weird place, enjoyed sleeping with him. “What’s the hurry?” she asked.

  “Well, it isn’t exactly a hurry,” he said. “I’ve been here almost a week as it is, and Hiram’s wanted me back since Wednesday. I stalled it as long as I could, but now I gotta go. I said to him, ‘Why don’t I stay till the end of the trial?’ and he said, ‘We have somebody covering the trial.’ ”

  “Me.”

  “That’s who he had in mind, all right.”

  “I’ll miss you,” she said.

  His face was really very attractive, in those rare moments when he permitted an honest expression to cross it. “We’ll miss one another,” he said with a rueful smile. “But then we’ll be together again.”

  “I’ll hurry home.”

  “You do that. The instant the trial’s over.”

  “In the meantime,” she said, pointing at his wineglass, “don’t drink too much of that stuff. I’ll want you at your best tonight, fo
r the farewell scene.”

  30

  Binx Radwell slept, when he slept, humidly, curled on his side, arms and legs bent, hands and feet twitching like a dog chasing a rabbit in his dreams—only, in his dreams, Binx was the rabbit. And Binx awoke, when he awoke, in terror, eyes staring, heart pounding, listening for horrors in the dark. Then he’d get up and work a while on the project until he was calm enough to go back to bed.

  No one in the world knew about Binx’s project, and perhaps no one ever would. No one knew that Binx was a changed man, and perhaps no one ever would, but he was. The change had begun during the time when he was fired, when his fear and despair were at their most acute, and when he had nothing but time on his hands. He’d started the project then, partly to distract himself from reality and partly as an excuse to close himself into his study, away from Marcie and the kids.

  Then, when he was rehired, the project languished, he returning to it only occasionally, usually when on assignment on the road. But when Massa died, and the Pure Reef Development Corporation took over control of the Galaxy, Binx knew immediately and instinctively that change was coming and that the change could not possibly be for the good. He went back to the project, then, more seriously than he’d done anything in years, and it had grown.

  He still worked on it, but only at night, when the great tides heaved him out of sleep onto the stony shore of consciousness. By day, he was either too busy or had been drinking too much; only at night, in the sharp edge of night’s terror, did he have the clarity to work on the project.

  Saturday night, Branson, Missouri. Binx’s bedroom in the Galaxy house on Cherokee is the only room in the house to remain what it had been, all the rest having been converted to the purposes of communication. Three times he clawed out of sleep, shaking, sweating, and calmed himself with half an hour or so of further work on the project. The fourth time he jolted awake, scared, staring, surrounded by enemies, there was daylight beyond the drawn window shade and the sounds of voices on the other side of his closed door.

  It was Sunday, and there was no rest for the wicked. Binx arose, locked the project away in the attaché case under the bed as usual, spent some time in the adjoining bath, and went out to see what fresh mischief had been occupying his troops. Later today, he’d have to go over to 222, which still sailed merrily on like a ship of the heedless condemned in an allegory, but not yet; he wasn’t up to 222 just yet.