It was, of course, an irresistible offer. If they got twenty-five thousand dollars a year, an incredible sum, why worry if Doran got thirty percent of the rest? And how could their boy, Rory, make more than that amount? Impossible. There was not that much money. Doran also assured Mr. Horatio Bascombe and Mrs. Edith Bascombe that he would not charge them for any expenses. So a contract was prepared and signed.
Doran immediately went into furious action. He borrowed money to produce an album of gospel songs. It was an enormous hit. In that first year the boy Rory earned over fifty thousand dollars. Doran immediately moved to Nashville and made connections in the music world. He took Janelle with him and made her administrative assistant in his new music company. The second year Rory made more than a hundred thousand dollars, most of it on a single of an old religious ballad Janelle found in Doran’s disc jockey files. Doran had absolutely no creative taste in any sense; he would never have recognized the worth of the song.
Doran and Janelle were living together now. But she didn’t see that much of him. He was traveling to Hollywood for a movie deal or to New York to get an exclusive contract with one of the big recording companies. They would all be millionaires. Then the catastrophe. Rory caught a bad cold and seemed to lose his voice. Doran took him to the best specialist in New York. The specialist cured Rory completely but then casually, just in passing, said to Doran, “You know his voice will change as he goes into puberty.”
It was something that Doran had not thought of. Maybe because Rory was big for his age. Maybe because Rory was a totally innocent young boy, unworldly. He had been shielded from girlfriends by his mother and father. He loved music and was indeed an accomplished musician. Also, he had always been sickly until his eleventh year. Doran was frantic. A man who has the location of a secret gold mine and misplaced the map. He had plans to make millions out of Rory; now he saw it all going down the drain. Millions of dollars at stake. Literally millions of dollars!
Then Doran got one of his greater ideas. He checked it out medically. After he had all the dope, he tried his scheme out on Janelle. She was horrified.
“You are a terrible son of a bitch,” she said, almost in tears.
Doran couldn’t understand her horror. “Listen,” he said, “the Catholic Church used to do it.”
“They did it for God,” Janelle said. “Not for a gold album.”
Doran shook his head. “Please stick to the point. I have to convince the kid and his mother and father, that’s going to be a hell of a job.”
Janelle laughed. “You really are crazy. I won’t help you, and even if I did, you’ll never convince one of them.”
Doran smiled at her. “The father is the key. I was thinking you could be nice to him. Soften him up for me.”
It was before Doran had acquired the creamy, sunlit, extra smoothness of California. So when Janelle threw the heavy ashtray at him, he was too surprised to duck. It chipped one of his teeth and made his mouth bleed. He didn’t get angry. He just shook his head at Janelle’s squareness.
Janelle would have left him then, but she was too curious. She wanted to see if Doran could really pull it off.
Doran was, in general, a good judge of character, and he was really sharp on finding the greed threshold. He knew one key was Mr. Horatio Bascombe. The father could swing his wife and son. Also, the father was the most vulnerable to life. If his son failed to make money, it was back to going to church for Mr. Bascombe. No more traveling around the country, playing piano, tickling pretty girls, eating exotic foods. Just his worn-out wife. The father had most at stake; the loss of Rory’s voice was more important to him than anyone.
Doran softened Mr. Bascombe up with a pretty little singer from a sleazy Nashville jazz club. Then a fine dinner with cigars the following evening. Over cigars he outlined Rory’s career. A Broadway musical, an album with special songs written by the famous Dean brothers. Then a big role in a movie that might turn Rory into another Judy Garland or Elvis Presley. You wouldn’t be able to count the money. Bascombe was drinking it all in, purring like a cat. Not even greedy because it was all there. It was inevitable. He was a millionaire. Then Doran sprang it on him.
“There’s only one thing wrong,” Doran said. “The doctors say his voice is about to change. He’s going into puberty.”
Bascombe was a little worried. ‘His voice will get a little deeper. Maybe it will be better.”
Doran shook his head. “What makes him a superstar is that high, clear sweetness. Sure he might be better. But it will take him five years to train it and break through with a new image. And then it’s a hundred to one shot he’ll make it big. I sold him to everybody on the voice he has now.”
“Well, maybe his voice won’t change,” Bascombe said.
“Yeah, maybe it won’t,” Doran said and left it at that.
Two days later Bascombe came around to his apartment. Janelle let him in and gave him a drink. He looked her over pretty carefully, but she ignored him. And when he and Doran started talking, she left the room.
That night in bed, after making love, Janelle asked Doran, “How is your dirty little scheme coming?”
Doran grinned. He knew Janelle despised him for what he was doing, but she was such a great broad she had still given him her usual great piece of ass. Like Rory, she still didn’t know how great she was. Doran felt content. That’s what he liked, good service. People who didn’t know their value.
“I’ve got the greedy old bastard hooked,” he said. “Now I’ve got to work on the mother and the kid.”
Doran, who thought he was the greatest salesman east of the Rockies, attributed his final success to those powers. But the truth was that he was lucky. Mr. Bascombe had been softened up by the extremely hard life he had led before the miracle of his son’s voice. He could not give up the golden dream and go back to slavery. That was not so unusual. Where Doran got really lucky was with the mother.
Mrs. Bascombe had been a small-town Southern belle, mildly promiscuous in her teens and swept off her feet into matrimony by Horatio Bascombe’s piano playing and Southern small-town charm. As her beauty faded year by year, she succumbed to the swampy miasma of Southern religiosity. As her husband became more unlovable, Mrs. Bascombe found Jesus more attractive. Her son’s voice was her love offering to Jesus. Doran worked on that. He kept Janelle in the room while he talked to Mrs. Bascombe, knowing the delicate subject matter would make the older woman nervous if she were alone with a male.
Doran was respectfully charming and attentive to Mrs. Bascombe. He pointed out that in the years to come a hundred million people all over the world would hear her son, Rory, singing the glories of Jesus. In Catholic countries, in Moslem countries, in Israel, in the cities of Africa. Her son would be the most powerful evangelist for the Christian religion since Luther. He would be bigger than Billy Graham, bigger than Oral Roberts, two of Mrs. Bascombe’s saints on earth. And her son would be saved from the most grievous and easiest-to-fall-into sin on this earth. It was clearly the will of God.
Janelle watched them both. She was fascinated by Doran. That he could do such a thing without being evil, merely mercenary. He was like a child stealing pennies from his mother’s pocket book. And Mrs. Bascombe after an hour of Doran’s feverish pleading was weakening. Doran finished her off.
“Mrs. Bascombe, I just know you’ll make this sacrifice for Jesus. The big problem is your son, Rory. He’s just a boy, and you know how boys are.”