It hadn’t been Ray’s day for quite a while, all things considered. First the cock-ups in building the theater on the Strip, then the breach-of-contract suit from those bastards in Nashville, then the IRS, and now this murder trial. Some parlay.
Ray still wasn’t sure it was right to let his songs play on the radio during the trial; seemed disrespectful somehow. Seemed as if he wasn’t taking that poor bitch’s death seriously. But every one of his advisers — and Ray Jones, it seemed to Ray Jones, had more advisers than a horse has flies — every last one of them had told him to let the songs play on, trial be damned. Each one for his own separate reasons.
Warren Thurbridge, for instance, his trial lawyer, criminal attorney with all that silver hair, said, “You’re going to have a sequestered jury, Ray, since it’s a capital case. For the length of the trial, those people will not have radio, TV, newspapers, nothing from the outside world to confuse their judgment. And what you want is for those jurors to enter into that cloistered situation with your songs circling in their minds.
“ ‘Baby, Would I Lie?’ ‘The Dog Come Back’? Are you sure?”
“You just keep twinkling at them, Ray,” Warren Thurbridge advised.
Jolie Grubbe, his regular lawyer, the hardest fat woman alive, the one who did his contracts and divorces and was handling this current problem with the IRS, had her own reason. “You pull your songs,” she said, “it looks like embarrassment and remorse, and that translates as guilt. If you aren’t guilty, don’t act guilty.”
Well, that was part of the problem. The situation wasn’t quite as simple as Jolie thought, but he couldn’t very well go into a song and dance on the subject, could he? Not even with Jolie Grubbe.
Chuck Wagner, his manager, took a different tack: “There’s twenty-six theaters in Branson, Ray, and half of them got a superstar on the inside: Willie Nelson, Mel Tillis, Loretta Lynn, Moe Bandy, Andy Williams. Doin two shows a day. Plus all those Baldknobbers and Presley families and Foggy River Boys that was here before you headliners ever showed up. You got to let the people know you’re in town, Ray.”
“The trial will tell them.”
But Chuck shook his head, pointed at the surrounding hills, and said, “That’s over in Forsyth, in the county seat. These tourists here don’t know a thing except Branson and the lakes.” He pointed in another direction. “Stuck in traffic out there on the Strip, taking forty minutes to go half a mile, they got their radios on. You want them to hear you, Ray, and say to one another, ‘Let’s go see that boy.’ ”
“If they ever get out of the traffic.”
“Right.”
Cal Denny, Ray’s oldest friend and closest crony, the nearest thing in the world to somebody he’d trust, had a typically Cal reaction: “You got to sing, Ray,” Cal said, bony face all wide-eyed with astonishment. “What you got there’s a God-given talent; you got to give it to the people. It don’t matter what happens anywheres else.”
With a twisted smile, Ray said, “The show gotta go on, right?”
But one of the great things about Cal was that he was so honest, so straight, so simple, so dumb. That’s how he’d survived all the years, all the hassles, all the storms that had raged through Ray Jones’s life, so that today he was Ray’s oldest friend, they having met forty-two years ago in fourth grade in Central District School 6, Troutman, Georgia. And that simple honesty made Cal take Ray’s showbiz question at face value. “Yeah, you gotta go on!” he said. “And you gotta let the radio say you’re here. You can’t disappoint your fans. You got people there, you got families, drove hundreds of miles to see you, Ray; they been plannin this trip all year.”
Which was probably true, too.
Milt Lieberson, Ray Jones’s agent, a fat fellow who was somehow stuck halfway between frog and prince, had flown down from L.A. to offer still another argument: “Airtime translates into record sales,” he pointed out, “which translates into royalties. And you have never in your life needed money more than you do right now.”
Well, that was true enough. And the thought of money led inevitably to thoughts of the prick from the IRS, Leon Caccatorro, the nerd in gray wool, weighing in with the official point of view: “The government wouldn’t want you, at this point, Mr. Jones, to do anything that might interfere with future earnings.”
“I bet the government wouldn’t.”
“The government would prefer you to carry on your career as usual,” said Leon “The Prick” Caccatorro, “regardless of any other legal problems you may face.”
Other legal problems. Charged with murder one, kidnapping, aggravated assault, rape, sodomy, and a few other little indictments placed like scalloped potatoes around the edge of the plate. Here in a death-penalty state: poison gas in Missouri, the pellet under your chair. Some legal problems. It took a prick like Leon Caccatorro to phrase it in just precisely that bloodless way.
Well, despite this mountain of problems, Ray Jones’s music would, it seemed, continue to be pumped out over the airwaves; wise, down-home, cynical, sentimental, playful, good-ole-boy: whatever the customer will take. Will take to his or her gnarly little heart, no matter what the outside world — the world outside country, that is — says that bad boy did this time.
Here’s what the outside world said Ray Jones had done, this time. According to the indictment, on July 12 of this year, at approximately two in the morning, Ray Jones had driven his Acura SNX sports car out of Branson on Route 165, south past the turnoff to Porte Regal, the home/condo/golf course complex in which Ray owned this nice three-bedroom two-story wood-brick-stone place right off the thirteenth tee, had continued on south, and just before the bridge over Table Rock Dam, he had turned off onto the small road leading down to the Shepherd of the Hills Fish Hatchery, parking near the edge of Lake Taneycomo, with the imposing hydroelectric dam just up to his right. Accompanying him had been one Belle Hardwick, a spinster of this parish, thirty-one years of age, a cashier at the Ray Jones Country Theater on the Strip. As the indictment would have it, a disagreement had occurred within the automobile, causing Ray Jones to strike out, breaking the nose, cheekbone, and two fingers of the left hand of Belle Hardwick. Whether Ms. Hardwick had then attempted to leave the vehicle by her own volition or had been pulled from it by Ray Jones was a matter not decided upon in the indictment; in any case, with her on the ground beside the car, states the indictment, Ray Jones proceeded variously to rape and sodomize Belle Hardwick, in the course of which he broke two of her ribs and one large bone in her upper right arm. Then or shortly thereafter, Ray Jones also attempted to strangle the woman, who remained alive, though probably comatose, despite his efforts. He therefore then dragged her down through the brush and weeds to the bank of Lake Taneycomo, thrust her into the water, and held her down until she drowned. After an ineffectual effort to keep the body submerged by entangling it in roots and wedging it with branches, Ray Jones had returned to his car and driven on home to Porte Regal, where he had disposed of his muddied and bloodied clothing in some fashion, then gone to bed.
Here’s what Ray Jones had to say in response to all that: He said it was bullshit. He said anybody in the world could screw Belle Hardwick for a kind word and a drink, and the kind word was optional. He said he was home alone in bed asleep at two that morning. He said his Acura SNX sports car was kept out in the driveway with the key in the ignition, and a dozen of his cronies and pals knew that’s where he kept it, and sometimes one or another of them even borrowed the car. He said he had trouble enough without this bullshit.