I knew Tamar was going to be a big star the minute I heard her for the first time. She could bang out a song like Cher, or hoot and holler like Steven Tyler. She could bend notes like the best blues and country singers, or break and yodel like Alanis Morissette. And sweet! Oh Jesus, what asweet wonderful voice! She could break your heart with the simplest ballad. Like an angel. She sang like an angel.
Every store I went into, I told them to watch out for Tamar Valparaiso.
I told them Tamar Valparaiso was going to be the next big singing sensation.
THIS KID WORKEDin the shop just around the corner from our office. I used to stop in there after lunch almost every day. Just before I went back upstairs. Lorelei Records. I checked out the product, the displays, told this kid what was hot for us this week…
Avery Hanes.
That’s his name.
Told him what was coming down the pike, what he should be on the lookout for. Tamar Valparaiso, I told him. Coming in May. The album is calledBandersnatch. That’s the title song, “Bandersnatch.” Watch for it. We’ll be doing a terrific video. Watch for it. Tamar Valparaiso.
One day…
Q: Is Avery Hanes the person who made the ransom calls?
A: Yes.
Q: Is Avery Hanes the person who actually kidnapped Tamar Valparaiso?
A: Well, not alone. He wasn’t working alone. I gave him all the information about the launch, and he told me he thought he could do it with just three people. Himself and two other people.
Q: Who were these two other people?
A: I have no idea.
Q: Do the names…excuse me. Steve, what were those names again?
A: (from Detective Carella) Calvin Wilkins and Kellie Something, we don’t have a last name for her.
Q: Do those names mean anything to you, Mr. Loomis?
A: Nothing at all.
Q: So the only person you dealt with was Avery Hanes.
A: Yes.
Q: Was the kidnapping his idea?
A: Well, it sort of evolved.
Q: How do you mean?
A: From talks we had. We discussed all sorts of approaches, he’s really a quite brilliant young man. Primarily, I was concerned with how to make the debut album a success. I had such faith in Tamar, I wanted so much for her to make it in a big way…
Avery didn’t care how he spent my money, of course, well, you know how young people are, nothing’s impossible to them. All these big ideas about massive in-store promos, and TV ads, and subway posters, and ads on the sides of busses, ten cities, twenty cities, a hundred cities! He was talking about millions in advertising and promotion alone, a prohibitive approach, really, on top of everything else we’d be doing.
At first, we met in my office. He’d come up on his lunch hour, and we’d discuss his ideas. I like to encourage young people, I’m very good with young people. And he was so…enthusiastic,do you know? One day, he said something about five minutes of fame, fifteen minutes of fame, whatever it was, Andy Warhol’s famous saying. He said if only we could do something that could give Tamar just those fifteen minutes of fame, was what it was, then the rest would follow. Like if she broke her leg onstage during a concert…
“But she won’t be doing any concerts till after the album release,” I told him.
“Or got hit by a bus…” he said.
“Oh sure, hit by a bus.”
“Do you remember when this writer Ira Levin wrote a book calledA Kiss Before Dying, where the last chapter is this girl gets pushed off the roof? Well, right after the book was published this girl in real life fell off a roof someplace in New York, and she had a copy of the goddamnbook in her pocket! Something like that, you know?”
“Sure, we’ll push Tamar off the roof.”
“Come on, Barney…”
He was calling me Barney by then.
“…I’m talking about something spectacular. Something that will make headlines.”
“Like what?”
“Like she gets smacked around by some goon in a disco…”
“No, no.”
“…or somebody’s stalking her…”
“That won’t make headlines.”
“…or she gets kidnapped or something,” Avery said, and we both looked at each other.
There’s that moment, you know?
There’s that moment when you realize this is it.
Avery suggested fifty thousand dollars as the ransom, but I said we’d never find anyone to do it for that kind of money, so he said, “Okay a hundred, how does that sound?” and I said that still sounded too low, one minute he’s talking about spending ten million dollars in as many cities, and now he’s down to a hundred grand! I told him that would sound phony as hell, and besides, no one would risk a kidnapping for a lousy hundred thousand dollars! So we batted it back and forth until we hit on two-fifty, which was, after all, a quarter of a million dollars, a not unreasonable asking price for someone who was not yet a star.
I don’t think he was playing me, do you think he was playing me? I mean, I don’t think he knew all along that he was the one who’d be doing the actual kidnapping, I don’t think he was bargaining for a higher fee. There was an innocence about Avery…well, he double-crossed me later on. But at the time, I think he genuinely was just so enthusiastic about the idea, justinto it, you know, working with me to find what would sound like a reasonable ransom demand, not too low, not too high, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars had just the rightring to it, the way the whole idea seemed absolutelyright.
But then we faced the reality.
Never mind the fifteen minutes of fame. Who were we going to find who’d risk getting caught doing something as serious as a kidnapping? And who could we trust to keep quietif they got caught? Who could we trust not to say that Barney Loomis of Bison Records had engineered the kidnapping of his own young recording artist?
“You could trustme, ” Avery said.
I looked at him.
“I’d do it,” he said.
Q: When did you hatch this brilliant scheme?
Little touch of sarcasm there, Carella thought. Be careful, Nellie. He’ll spook and tell you to go to hell, no more questions.
Q: Mr. Loomis? When did you and Mr. Hanes decide that he would be the one to carry out the kidnapping scheme?
A: It must have been in March sometime. We set everything in motion in March. That was when he found the house at the beach…
Q: The house at the beach?
A: South Beach. He rented a house there. To take Tamar to. He had his team together by then, he told me they were both experienced people, it should go off without a hitch. As a matter of fact, it did. Though I have to tell you I could havekilled whoever that was with him on the night of the launch, when he slapped Tamar…
Q: The name Calvin Wilkins still doesn’t mean anything to you, is that correct?
A: I never heard of him.
Q: And the first name Kellie?
A: No. Whoever it was, the deal was nobody lays a finger on her, Avery knew that. Keep her for forty-eight hours, collect the ransom—which was really his fee for his role in all this—and then let her go safe and sound. That was the deal. He knew all the details of the launch party, I’d provided him with those, he even had a floor plan of theRiver Princess. It was frightening as hell when they came down those stairs, wasn’t it? Did you see the Channel Four tape? It looked real as hell, didn’t it?