Ken Darby answered the phone on the third ring.
“Hey, Chief,” she greeted. “I just hit the motherload tonight.”
“Oh yeah?” he asked. It had been he who had assigned her to go to the hotel in Boston and see what she could dig up on Celia Valdez. A shot in the dark, true, but it seemed it had been an accurate shot. “What do you got?”
She told him.
“You’re fucking kidding me,” he declared.
“I wouldn’t kid about something like this, Chief,” she assured him.
“Will we be able to run it in the next edition?”
“I’ll start going full blast on it tomorrow morning,” she told him. “I’ll do a little more digging, verify what I can verify, and then call Kingsley’s agent, Celia’s agent, and Kingsley’s wife’s agent if she has one. They will undoubtedly deny everything, but we will have fulfilled our obligation to run the accusations by them.”
“All right,” he said happily. “Good job. Get it all written up and on my desk by Thursday night, if possible. I’ll get someone working on some file photos of everyone involved.”
“You got it, Chief,” she promised.
Since KVA Records had some business to discuss with the members of Brainwash—the negotiation and signing of the contract for their next album—and since the members of Brainwash lived and worked in Providence, which was pretty much next door to Boston, Pauline accompanied Jake on his flight to join Laura on her tour break. They figured they could knock out two birds with one stone.
Their flight touched down at Logan International at 5:37 PM, eastern daylight time. They rented a 1996 Lexus sedan and made the one-hour drive to the Hilton Hotel in Providence, where Jake had reserved two suites. After check-in, they both showered and put on business casual clothes for the upcoming dinner meeting. They met their one and only signed act in the restaurant on the top floor of the building.
Jake and Pauline had not kept in touch with Jim, Marcie, Jeremy, Steph, and Rick as much as they probably should have since the release of their debut album eighteen months before. Jake himself signed all of their royalty checks and occasionally updated them by phone on his promotional plans. Pauline called them once in a while on sales and income figures. That equation had changed of late, however. Both had been calling the bandmembers frequently to discuss the upcoming recording sessions for their next album, which would be put together over the summer. Neither of the siblings had actually been in the same room with any of the Brainwash members since they had left Coos Bay and gone home back in early September of 1994.
They did not look all that different, Jake noted as they all shook hands and/or hugged one another after meeting up. Jim had put on a little bit more pudge around his middle. Marcie had taken to dying her head a shade of auburn to cover her increasing supply of gray hairs. Steph had added a few tattoos to her upper arms. Jeremy still looked like a stereotypical teacher. Rick was still bald and shaving his head, though he had used some of his Brainwash money to have laser surgery on his eyeballs and no longer wore glasses.
“So, how has success been treating everyone?” Jake asked once they finished the greetings and sat down to enjoy their wine. “Is everyone still teaching?”
“We’re all still working full-time at the profession,” Jim said. “We pulled in some pretty good money from the album, but not quite enough that any of us are comfortable quitting our primary gigs.”
Jake nodded thoughtfully at this. Since he signed the checks, he knew exactly how much all of them had made (and were still making) in royalty money. Their album had just breached the triple platinum mark in the last quarter—more than three million copies sold in the United States. Each member of Brainwash had earned just a hair over five hundred and fifty thousand dollars in royalties since the debut. A tremendous amount to the group of lower middle-class teachers, and certainly very helpful to their cause, but nowhere near enough to comfortably retire on; especially when you considered that a sizable proportion of that $550K had gone to pay taxes to Uncle Sam and Aunt Rhode Island.
“It is nice to not be living paycheck to paycheck anymore,” Marcie put in. “To be able to put big chunks of money into savings each month. And we’ve splurged a little. We paid off all of our credit cards and don’t use them anymore. We’ve bought new cars—a Toyota Camry for me and a Beemer for Jim—and we’ve gone on several trips with the kids to Disney World and stayed in first-class rooms.”
“That’s good,” Jake said with a smile. “You should splurge with your money. Enjoy life.”
“I bought a Corvette,” Jeremy said. “And Jenny and I went on a cruise over last spring break; had a suite and everything.”
“We paid off our house,” said Rick. “It is so nice not having a mortgage payment every month.”
“I bought a new house,” said Steph. “A nice big two-story over in Blackstone.”
“That’s the hoity-toity neighborhood over on the east side,” Jim said. “Where all the doctors and dentists and lawyers and real estate developers live.”
“That’s right,” Steph said with a smile. “And you should see them look down their snobby fuckin’ noses at the lesbian schoolteacher musician that invaded their turf. There ain’t been this much uproar on my street since that black doctor moved in ten years ago.”
Jake chuckled. “I am familiar with the experience,” he told her, thinking of everything that had happened when he first moved into the Nottingham Drive home back when he first started making some real money. “Hopefully, they’re not throwing bowling balls through your window or cementing crosses into your front lawn.”
“Or putting acid in your hot tub,” added Pauline.
Steph was actually shocked by this suggestion. “No, nothing like that,” she said. “It’s more like ignoring me at the mailbox and giving me dirty looks in the grocery store. Oh ... and a couple times they called the cops on me when I had a girlfriend over.”
“Called the cops on you for that?” Pauline asked.
“Apparently, they are under the impression that me entertaining a sister lesbian is illegal under Rhode Island state law.”
Jake and Pauline shook their heads. “The more I get to know people, the more I dislike them,” Jake said.
“I’ll drink to that,” Steph said, picking up her wine glass and doing just that.
“What about the school district people and the PTA?” asked Pauline. “Are they still riding your asses?”
“They have permanent seats on our asses,” Jim assured her. “They have made it their mission to get rid of us by any means possible. They have tried appealing to our sense of professionalism by asking us to resign to protect the children from our influence. The PTA has tried to put pressure on the school board to dismiss us for cause because we are creating a distraction to the learning environment. The school board actually gave that a shot, by the way. They were shot down the first time the grievances we filed got in front of an arbitration board.”
“All of us have been written up for petty or even nonexistent offenses multiple times,” Marcie put in. “None of those writeups survived the arbitration process either, but they still keep trying.”
“My personal favorite,” Steph said, “was when they tried to promote me to management to get rid of me.”
“Promote you to get rid of you?” Jake asked. “How does that work?”
“Out of the blue one day, they offered to promote me to head of the physical education department,” she said. “That way, they explained, I would be out of the classroom and no longer a distraction to the children, and I would be able to shape the curriculum to my heart’s content.”