"So why would he want to vanish?"
Allison crossed her legs at the ankles and hunched forward, tapping her finger on her chin like she was pretending to think. "Gosh, Tres. Aside from the fact that he could never get out of his job any other way, that he was a naturalborn son of a bitch, that his client list was eroding so bad he had to pin his hopes on unknowns like Miranda, that he was drinking or snorting or popping most of his profits, that he and I fought every time we saw each other-I just can't imagine."
I stared at my lap, where I'd been collecting the most useful things from Les' desk drawers.
I held up a black leather shaving kit full of pill bottles and bags. I pulled out one Ziploc with a dozen white tablets in it.
"Amphetamines?" I asked.
Allison shrugged. "I can't keep track. He drinks Ryman whiskey straight. The pills change. I think that's Ritalin."
"The stuff they give hyperactive kids?"
She smiled. "That's my husband."
I dug through the other things-a '69 Denton High School yearbook, then some more photographs of Les with various music industry types.
"There's no will," I said.
"He won't make one. He was clear on that. He enjoys the idea of people fighting over his stuff when he's gone."
I shuffled through some other papers without really looking at them. I kept coming back to the photo of Patti Glynn.
"You said Miranda needed protecting from your husband. Is this what you meant?"
The idea seemed to amuse her. "I said she needed to kick butt for herself, sweetie-that's different than being protected. And God, no. Les wouldn't have messed with Miranda. Not like that, anyway."
"Because she has real talent?"
"Partly. Partly because of the way Miranda is."
"Country girl, naive, a little too sweet for her own good. Seems like just the kind Les liked to prey on, not too different from the girls in this box."
Allison smiled, disappointed. "I could say a lot of things, sweetie, but Miranda's my friend. You make your own conclusions."
I tried to read into that, but all I saw in her face was stubbornness. And maybe just the faintest tinge of resentment.
I looked down at the correspondence box. "These other women. Didn't they eventually figure out who Les was? Didn't they get angry? Cause problems?"
Allison frowned, like she was trying to remember some trivial detail from her prom night. "They got taken by Les for a few nights, maybe a few hundred dollars. They felt good that their careers might be going somewhere, then most of them faded back into the woodwork in Piano or Dimebox or wherever the hell they came from."
"You were one of them."
She flashed me exactly the same look she'd given Milo before she'd attacked him. It took her about thirty seconds to mentally stand down.
"No," she said. "You know the difference, sweetie? I got my revenge. I married the bastard."
"Not much of a last laugh."
Allison spread her fingers apart so she could examine the netting between them.
"Good enough."
"If you're right, if Les vanished on his own, I bet he left you nothing in the bank and all the payments on the house and the credit cards and no guarantee of any income from the agency, at least not without a court fight. You can't even collect life insurance until you get him declared legally dead, and that could take years."
Allison's anger melted into a little smile, like I'd just made a pass she had no intention of accepting but she appreciated the offer. She stood to leave.
"That's why I'm so glad you're here, Tres. You're going to bring old Les home to me."
She left me alone, staring at the picture of Patti Glynn but wondering this time if there was something besides innocence there, some latent potential for maliciousness that needed to be stomped on. For a disturbing moment, I thought I might be understanding Les SaintPierre.
I put the lid on the shoe box and decided it was time to leave.
27
Cam Compton's Monster Music was a twostory white cube on PerrinBeitel Road, right next to the Department of Public Safety. The bottom floor was the store, with burglarbarred windows and a five car parking lot and silver doors plastered with brand name guitar stickers. The top floor was Cam's residence. His front door was on the side of the building, accessed by a metal staircase and a narrow concrete walkway. There was one large picture window so Cam could look out every day and enjoy the scenery-an endless stream of gawky adolescents and bulldogfaced patrolmen engaged in the American ritual of parallel parking between the orange cones.
I tried upstairs first and got no answer. Then I tried the music store, which for a Friday afternoon was not exactly crawling with customers.
The guy behind the sales counter said, "Cam can't talk."
I looked over the guy's shoulder, through the glass wall into the room where Cam was giving a guitar lesson to an adolescent kid whose acne was the same shade of red as his Stratocaster.
Cam was hunched over, examining the kid's fingers as the kid moved them on the fret board. Cam's forehead had a pancakesized yellow and purple hickey on it from our last meeting at the Cactus Cafe. He had a heavy drinker's swollen morningafter face and rumpled clothes that suggested he'd crawled out of bed and down the steps just in time for this lesson. Probably a normal week in the life of a superstar guitarist.
I looked back at the salesman. He was a large man. Flabby large, with arms that had mass but no muscle lines. His face hadn't seen a razor blade or a toothbrush or even a nose hair clipper in a mighty long time. He had a HarleyDavidson Tshirt with cigarette burn holes on the belly.
"Cam's looked better," I said.
Harley grinned. "Some guy's been leaning on him. Some big ass motherfucker-private detective or something. He slammed Cam's head into a wall.
Then last night he came back and did Cam's ribs."
"You saw this?"
Harley leaned closer to me. "Naw, but you know what I told Cam-I said take me along next time. I'll put that dick motherfucker in a vise grip."
I smiled appreciatively.
The slow, distorted power chords of Bad Religion seeped through the glass window of the practice room. Cam nodded his head and the adolescent smiled. Talent under development.
"He'll want to talk to me," I told Harley. "Tell him it's the dick motherfucker."
Harley started to laugh, then he saw I was serious. He scratched his beard. He pointed at me with his thumb and tried to frame a question.
"I don't know about the ribs," I amended. "I just did the forehead. And it was a beer keg.
You get prettier bruises with a beer keg."
Harley searched his beard with his fingers a little more. Then slowly he cracked a grin.
He turned and started what he'd been doing before I came in-hanging guitar straps on a rotating display.
"Cam ain't much of a boss," Harley told me. "Be my guest."
I walked into the practice room. Cam was nodding his head and saying encouraging things about the adolescent's Fchord. Then they both saw me.
I winked at the kid and told him to keep up the good work with the Fchord. Then I looked at Cam, whose purplish forehead was turning almost flesh colour. "How you feeling?"
"Got a student," he managed to say.
"He can practice." I turned to the kid. "I bet you know 'Glycerine' already, don't you, Slick?"
The kid got that elated light in his eyes that beginning guitarists get when they actually know a request. He looked down and dutifully began plinking out the Bush song.
"Let's talk," I told Cam.
"Why you think I'd want to-"
"I went to see Alex Blanceagle last night. He looks a lot worse than you do. Jean paid him a visit."
Cam's beady, bloodshot eyes move an inch farther apart. He looked around uncomfortably, at his student, at Harley who was grinning sideways at us through the glass, waiting for some kind of show to start.