I told her thanks, put a dollar in her pitcher, and got up to leave.
Leena sighed. "The night goes downhill from here."
The bull riding arena was dark. Seventeen or eighteen empty rows of seats sloped down toward the circular pit. Nothing there but some red plastic barrels, rodeo clown props, two metal chute gates on the north wall hanging open apathetically. The dirt was scarred and streaked from the last round of boot heels and hooves that had pounded through it. Nobody had raked since then. Sloppy.
A man and a woman were sitting in the top row, arguing about somebody named Samantha. When they saw me they stopped, annoyed, and got up. They moved their conversation back into the dance hall.
The noise of the music and the crowd sounded tinny and far away, like it was echoing from the bottom of an oil tanker. I walked around the perimeter of the arena to a metal door with a sidebar and a white sign that read EMPLOYEES ONLY. I looked for an alarm wire. None. No surveillance camera. I pushed the door open.
Inside was an empty office with cheesy walnut panelling and pink carpeting. There were three metal desks. On the wall were framed posters of Tilden Sheckly's washedup Bgrade artists, Julie Kearnes among them. There was plenty of blank space on the wall for Miranda Daniels a few years down the line. Probably several others, too.
Two doors led out of the room, left and right. The left one said STUDIO and the right said SHECK. I looked for surveillance equipment on the SHECK door and found none.
Okay.
The handle turned.
One look at the layout of the office and I was tempted to close the door and try coming back in again, just to make sure I was seeing correctly.
It looked like a cross between a safari hunter's tent and a Hard Rock Cafe. A huge zebraskin rug took up most of the floor. A mounted tiger's head glared at me from the wall behind the desk. The ceiling was decorated with deer antlers like stalactites. On the east wall a padlocked gun display glowed from inside, showing off all sorts of rifles and shotguns. On the west wall an identical case was filled with musical instruments—a fiddle, two acoustic guitars, a black electric. I looked closer at the instruments. The fiddle had Bob Wills' name on it, set in motherofpearl.
I went to the desk.
After five minutes rummaging I hadn't learned much. The few personal records Sheckly kept were all done by hand, scrawled in a thirdgrade cursive with all the b's and d's slanting backward and none of the i's dotted. He was a doodler; little stars and curlicues adorned the margins of his notes.
Sheck had been making some calls recently about a trucking company he owned that had apparently been losing stock value. He also had notes on phone calls he'd made with Les, among other agents, discussing the terms of various deals with performers scheduled to play the Paintbrush. As Leena the bartender had indicated, there were several notes about managers and agents protesting Tilden's unstated rights to his radio broadcasts of the headliner shows. Apparently the artists got no percentage of the syndication money and had no say over the mix or content of the show that was recorded.
There were also airline receipts for trips to Europe dating back several years—mostly to Germany and the Czech Republic. Some were made out to Tilden Sheckly. Others to someone named Alexander Blanceagle. On two of the itineraries from early last year Alexander Blanceagle was listed as travelling with Julie Kearnes. I took those.
Last was a folder with a schedule of artists' names next to dates they had performed over the last two years. Some of these names had checks, some stars. There were no notes about Miranda Daniels. No pictures of Les SaintPierre with dart holes in his forehead.
I walked back into the main office and tried the second door, the one labelled STUDIO.
It opened easily.
The room on the other side was about twenty by twenty, brightly lit, and completely quiet. The walls and ceiling were white acoustic tile, the floor tan industrial carpet.
Clumps of boom microphone stands stuck up here and there like oversized toothpick sculptures. The left wall was covered with milk crates, towers of expensive stereo equipment, and speakers all stacked together haphazardly, many topped with collections of old McDonald's soda cups.
Against the right wall was a tenfootlong mixing board. A man sat sideways next to it in a battered easy chair, turning control knobs and listening through Walkmanstyle earphones.
He was oddly built, muscular but gangly, his face angular and goofylooking with freckles in a raccoon pattern across his nose and ears that, if not pinned back by headphones, would have made perfect little radar dishes on the sides of his head. A standardissue Hayseed. The only thing not comical about him was the bulge under his beige windbreaker, right about where a shoulder holster would go.
He was most definitely drunk. A nearempty bottle of Captain Morgan's sat next to him on the console. His eyes were heavylidded and his fingers were having trouble with the sound board controls.
I stepped into the room.
When Hayseed finally noticed me, he took a few seconds of blinking and frowning to decide I wasn't just another stack of musical equipment. He brought the easy chair into upright position and spent some time trying to connect both his feet to the floor. He got his hands working, groped up the side of his head until he found the earphones and removed them.
"Evening," I said.
He looked at me more closely and his ears turned red. "Goddamn Jean—"
He said Jean the French way, the Claude Van Damme way.
I was about to correct him when he stood up and began staggering toward me, reaching for the now exposed black butt of his gun with one unsteady hand.
That pretty much decided me against the diplomatic approach.
11
I met Hayseed halfway across the room and heel kicked him in the shin to take his mind off the gun. He grunted, stumbled forward one more step, his hands moving down instinctively toward the pain.
I grabbed his shoulders and forced him backward. When he tipped over the side of the easy chair, his knees went up and his butt sank and the back of his head hit the mixing board. The equalizer lights did a crazy little surge. His bottle of Captain Morgan's toppled over, speckling the controls with rum.
Hayseed stayed put, his arms splayed and his knees up around his ears in hogtie position. He made a little groaning sound in his throat, like he was showing displeasure at a very bad pun.
I extracted a .38 revolver from his shoulder holster, emptied its chambers, threw gun and bullets into a nearby milk crate. I found his wallet in the pocket of his windbreaker and emptied that, too. He had twelve dollars, a driver's license that read ALEXANDER
BLANCEAGLE, 1600 MECCA, HOLLYWOOD PARK, TX, and a Paintbrush Enterprises business card identifying him as Business Manager.
I looked at the mixing board. Rows of equalizer lights still bounced up and down happily. A bank of CD burners and digital disc drives were daisychained together, all with beady little green eyes, ready to go. There were six or seven chunky onegigabyte cartridges scattered across the board. I picked up the earphones Alex had been wearing and listened—country music, recorded live, male singer, nothing I recognized.
Behind the chair was an unzipped black duffel bag filled with more recording cartridges and some microphone cords and a bunch of paper folders and files I didn't have time to look through.
Blanceagle's groaning changed pitch, got a little more insistent.