“But the DA ain’t going to find out about that,” Ray insisted.
“Ray, excuse me for allowing a little reality to intrude upon this discussion. But I think we’d both be better off if we assumed the District Attorney’s Office and the police are going to know everything.”
I paused for a second. “Everything!”
He jumped back. “Okay, okay!”
“Now let’s move on,” I said. My stomach churned. “Let’s look at her other business arrangements. I don’t know the music business very well. What other people did Rebecca work with?”
“Well, I guess the closest would be her personal manager, Mac Ford. Then there was her talent and booking agent, Faye Morgan over at CCA, the Concert Corporation of America. And then there was her accountant. What was his name? And the lawyer, of course.”
“Mac Ford,” I said. “I’ve heard of him. Got a weird name or something, hasn’t he? I’ve seen it in the papers.”
“Ford McKenna Ford is his real name, but everybody calls him Mac. He used to manage Slim and Rebecca both, but Slim left him after the divorce. Mac’s taken care of Rebecca since he stole her away from her original manager back when she and Slim were just selling their first songs.”
“Stole her?” I asked. “That happen often? Managers stealing each other’s clients away, I mean.”
Ray smiled. “You don’t know this business, do you?”
“So let me in on it.”
Ray leaned back, glad to take back control of the conversation. He threw his big snakeskin shitkickers up on the desk and intertwined his fingers into a headrest. Suddenly he’d changed from a serious, scared middle-aged guy about to lose it all to the country-music-industry insider who was holding court for the uninitiated. His ego was back in gear.
“Harry, I once knew a guy who paid an artist’s manager ten thousand cash under the table to talk him into a record deal that wound up ruining the singer’s career. The first thing you learn in this business is that people will lie to you when it’s goddamn easier to tell the truth, and would be a hell of a lot less to keep track of in the bargain. You got to watch out for yourself, ’cause the wounded are left behind or eaten.”
“But what about Rebecca?”
“Rebecca Gibson came to town in the late Seventies, with a little bit of talent as a singer, a lot of determination, and a whole lot of undiscovered talent as a songwriter. She had hair bouffed up to the ceiling, an ice-cream-cone bra, and dreams. That was about it. She got a job as a waitress and worked the open-mike nights for about two years before her first manager discovered her. He was a guy named Will Harmetz, and he was known then for hanging around the Trailways station like a child molester.”
“Was he? A child molester, I mean?”
“Let me put it this way. Rebecca spent most of her time with Will on her back with her legs in the air. But she was over twenty-one and he blew enough smoke up her ass that she was willing to put up with it. Besides, the world wasn’t exactly beating a path to her door. Then she met Slim.”
“And started to blossom.”
“You bet your ass she did. Slim taught her a lot, and she taught him a lot. They were going places, and the first thing they had to do was find a real manager. Mac Ford was just starting out then, but he was taking in some of the hippest young country acts around. He wasn’t getting very far with most of them, but he was in there punching. Rebecca had a long-term contract with this slimebag Harmetz. If I remember correctly, he was putting together a deal to have Rebecca start a tour singing in truck-stop restaurants. You believe that, man? Truck-stop restaurants …”
“So how’d he get her out of it?”
“Rebecca was going to go to Harmetz and just tell him she wanted out. Mac knew better, though. He knew Rebecca would eventually be worth something, and he figured Will Harmetz probably knew it, too. He also was savvy enough to know that if Harmetz figured Rebecca was about to jump ship, he’d just get the wagons in a circle.”
Ray was the Charlie Daniels of the mixed metaphor. I struggled to keep a straight face. “So what did they do?”
“By this time, Slim and Becca were living together and planning on getting married. Harmetz didn’t mind so much that she wasn’t doing the horizontal bop with him anymore. After all, there were other girls out there. Now that she was near her midtwenties, she was quickly becoming too old for him anyway. But she arranged to meet Will at his office for one last bout on the leather couch. She must have put it to him, because he fell asleep afterward. Rebecca lifted some of his letterhead, and Mac forged a letter releasing her from her contract. He forged Harmetz’s name, then had a friend notarize it for him.”
“They forged a release?” I asked, surprise in my voice.
“Sure, happens all the time. Then they made a few crappy-looking copies of it and planted them in file folders. Rebecca stuck the original back in Harmetz’s filing cabinet. And when he started raising hell about having her locked in on a long-term management contract, she just produced her copy and told him where to find his.”
“And he fell for it?”
“Wasn’t nothing to fall for,” Ray said. “Wasn’t nothing Harmetz could so. They had him by the short ones. Besides, this kind of shit happens all the time. Harmetz knew how the game was played. He certainly wasn’t surprised.”
“But you’d think he’d at least go to court and fight for it.”
“Oh, he tried. Threatened to, anyway. Said he owned twenty percent of everything she ever did for the rest of her career and a hundred percent of the name Rebecca Gibson. Becca just laughed and told him to get a life. An artist and a manager have almost a marriage. You can’t sue somebody to make ’em love you when they don’t anymore.”
“Given the way this society’s going, I’m surprised somebody hasn’t tried it,” I said. “But okay, we’ll add Will Harmetz to the list.”
“Well, you can add, but it won’t do any good in his case. He got drunker’n Cootie Mae Brown about five years ago and fell off a houseboat out in Percy Priest Lake. He washed up on the beach at Hermitage Landing on the Fourth of July weekend.”
I drew a line through Will Harmetz’s name. “Okay, so much for that. What about Mac Ford?”
“Well, I could see Mac Ford killing somebody. He is, after all, a manager. But it don’t make sense. He and Becca got along. They’d been working together for years. She was all set to make him some serious money. Mac’s kind of a wild man, but why would he want to kill her?”
I couldn’t answer that. “Okay, no motive for him. Who else?”
“Well, there’s Faye Morgan over at CCA.”
“All right, that’s something I don’t understand. What’s the difference between a booking agent and a manager?”
“A booking agent actually arranges the dates. The personal manager handles an artist’s business affairs, approves contracts, negotiates deals with record companies. Basically, anything an artist needs. You got to understand, Harry, some of these kids come up here out of these small towns where the most sophisticated thing they’ve ever seen is the VFW hall on Friday night. As a rule, they ain’t too well educated, and most of them are a little light in the basic-brains and common-sense department.”
Ray smiled like a cat with a mouthful of warm mouse. “Why there’s one famous-as-hell country singer, and I ain’t going to tell you who he is, who can’t even read. Literally can’t sign his own goddamn name.”
“But how do these people survive?” I protested. “It’s got to be a cutthroat business. Record deals have got to be complicated. How do they protect themselves?”
“Most of them can’t,” Ray said. “That’s why it’s so important to have a manager you can trust. And a booking agent who’s working for you and not against you. It’s real difficult, too, ’cause a lot of these yahoo hillbillies come up here and get lucky enough to cut one or two hit records, and all of a sudden theirs don’t stink anymore.”
“Get the big head, huh?” I realized we were getting sidetracked, but on the other hand, if I was going to jump into this cesspool, it sure would be nice to know where the rocks were.