Tough Baby (Martin Fender Novel) Read online

  “Bitchin' suit,” she said. “Makes you look like a gangster.” The first thing you noticed was her hair. It swelled up into a bubble on top, not as extreme as a beehive, but retro chic. Five foot five in black leather jacket, black western shirt with pearl buttons and white piping, tight black jeans, conch belt, boots. The half smile seemed like a promise of something better, or maybe just mischief. I liked her.

  “In fact,” she went on, “your whole band looks like a gang of bank robbers from some black-and-white movie.”

  “Are you a reporter?” I asked.

  Her laugh was a tinkling sound, like ice tumbling into a highball glass. “No, I’m not. I’m a detective, and I love the blues.” She extended a hand. “My name’s Retha Thomas.”

  “I’m Martin Fender,” I said.

  “I know. Can I buy you a drink?”

  “Drinks are free.”

  “How about a cigarette, then?” she said, tapping on a pack of Camel non-filters. My old brand. I took one and lit hers with the Zippo I still carried out of habit and respect for tradition. “Aren’t you going to light yours?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, sniffing it, rolling it around between my callused fingertips. “I quit.”

  She nodded knowingly. I stuffed the still-uncounted cash into my jacket and followed her into the bar.

  &&&

  It was already after three a.m. The band, the regulars, and a few characters I recognized as coke dealers, managers, and people with a nose for dropping in at the right place at the right time were singing happy birthday to someone I didn’t know. Leo sang the worst.

  I was glad to be back in Austin, but I still felt like I was in transit. I had a scattered feeling, like I was the victim of some sort of new age baggage foul-up, with my head still in New Orleans, my feet in Dallas, my fingers in Birmingham. Only my luggage had found its way to Austin, and it was still packed, sitting in the back of the van. I searched out the faces of the band members in the mirror behind the bar—Ray Whitfield, Leo Daly, Billy Ludwig, and myself. We all had that look, that thousand-yard stare. We’d get over it.

  It’s a long strange road out there—vans break down, club owners try to stiff you, and there aren’t many good enchiladas. Up through the crawfish circuit and the swamps and the backwoods of the delta where the blues was born, through a hundred Denny’s and over the interstates dodging methamphetamine-crazed truckers and sadistic highway patrolmen, up the East Coast through the gray slush of the last winter snow, playing the dives and college pubs and even a couple of hyper-trendy underground dance clubs in Manhattan, then trickling back through Ohio and Michigan and Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, grinding down frets and popping strings, eating breakfast at four a.m. in truck stops and getting kicked out of motels—we had been on the road and it had been on us. It did something to you. It made your hometown look like a strange town, like something you remembered from a dream. It made every bar seem the same. Because over all the miles and through all the drinks and the thick smoke and local chatter, some things always were the same. The music was the same. You pulled into town and people got plugged into your music, then you packed up and either split or stuck around for a few drinks and—until I’d quit—cigarettes, finding out that the people who had danced to your music were pretty much the same, or you went back to the motel. And motels were pretty much the same. When you live on the road, life is a road, and the people you encounter are pit stops.

  She looked good to me.

  “I hope you don’t think I’m trying to pick you up,” she said. She had fake fingernails, as unrealistic as birds’ beaks painted red and glued to her fingertips. But for some reason, they suited her.

  I shrugged. “I’ve got a girlfriend.”

  “The girl with the kid who was here earlier?”

  I nodded. “Ladonna. With Michael. Eight years old and he’s my most brutal critic.”

  “Maybe you’re just a wimp, or you haven’t run into that many critics.”

  I laughed. “Oh, I’ve known a few. I think he prefers more modem stuff. And I’m not his father.”

  “She’s really pretty.”

  “She is. She’s got to work tomorrow.”

  “You probably sleep till noon.”

  “You’re a good detective. What are you working on?”

  She smiled that half smile. The way it bared her eyeteeth suggested a possible cruel streak. Or maybe she was just trying to keep from smearing her teeth with lipstick. “I heard there’s a party. It looks like this one’s winding down.”

  “I don’t know.” I looked over at the bartender. She was running a rag over the bar with a look of finality. The beer chests were padlocked.

  Retha Thomas pointed at the cigarette I held close to my lips. “You gonna have a relapse? Light one up for old times’ sake?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There’s a jam session going on at the party. I heard that the band down at Antone’s was gonna head over there after their gig.”

  “Eddie Shaw and the Crows?”

  She nodded. I hadn’t jammed with the Crows in almost a year. Over in the comer, Leo had just told a bad joke. People were laughing anyway.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  &&&

  I put my bass in the trunk of her rented Ford and we went to the party. It was in a three-story house in Travis Heights, a rolling, shaded section of town just south of Town Lake. It was also no more than a fifteen-minute walk from my apartment on South 1st Street. Something to bear in mind, I thought, as we entered the raucous throng in the foyer. Disco music blared away at ear-splitting levels.

  We wormed our way through the crowd, trying to sniff out the liquor supply as we were carried along by the noisy current of hot flesh, twanging voices, smoke, and sloshing drinks. Before long we were out on the patio in back. A band was playing. The next thing I knew I was yanked up onto a makeshift stage. A clunky Japanese bass guitar was thrust in my hands, and Eddie winked at me and played a riff in E and the rest of us kicked in. The night air was heavy, and with the crowd hemming us in on all sides I was soon blowing pearls of sweat off the end of my nose. I don’t know how many songs we played. Some were Wilson Pickett songs, which I did not mind in the least. Some were mindless three-chord party jams, and those were OK too. After thirty minutes or so, a bass player I recognized got too close to the stage and I shoved the bass in his hands. I hopped off the platform, straight into the hot and sweaty embrace of Retha Thomas.

  It was like an electric shock.

  We clung. Two sweaty bodies colliding together will sometimes do that. She’d been dancing. I gave her a salty kiss. At first it was just a mindless thing, a reaction to our sudden collision, but then it took on a mind of its own, plunging deep and long as the humid mass of humanity pulsed around us. For a few seconds we were somewhere else, in a cheap motel room in a naked, sweaty knot—then a couple of drunks jostled us and we broke apart. I took her arm and we made our way through the dancing mob, back into the house, back into the disco music. I tried to avoid her gaze and brush off the sudden eruption of passion as just one of those things, but it was a halfhearted effort at best. My body throbbed for her.

  “I could use a drink,” she shouted in my ear.

  “Wait here,” I shouted back. She smelled like sweat and leather and perfume, and my face was wet where it had touched hers. She winked at me, and I think I winked back.

  I threaded my way toward the kitchen. It seemed that a couple of hundred Austinites weren’t worried about getting up and going to work tomorrow morning. Surely one of them could tell me where they were hiding the liquor. After an expedition that took a good ten or fifteen minutes, I came back with a couple of Styrofoam cups of Jack Daniel’s and ice. In the meantime, though, someone had given her a margarita.

  I combined the two whiskeys and we toasted. “To the detective business,” I said.

  “To the blues,” she said.

  We stood in the shadow of a hulk of welded scrap metal
. It looked like a dinosaur skeleton mating an oil derrick. She’d been in town a couple of weeks, she told me. “Working on what?” I asked. “You never said.”

  “And you never told me what kind of relationship you have with your girlfriend, or,” she said, fingering my lapel, “where you buy sexy suits like this.”

  “We’ve gone out for a couple of years. I have trouble discussing our relationship on postcards and long-distance phone calls. It’s no easier doing it now at a loud party with a stranger.” As if to prove my point, the music got louder. It was some sort of decadent dance music, martial drums and synthesized kazoos. Nascent bubble gum vocals. At least they had liquor.

  “It must be hard, being on the road, having a girlfriend.”

  “Hard? It’s crazy. But I’m crazy about her.”

  “She’d be crazy if she didn’t try hard to work things out. You’re very handsome, Martin. The way you handle that bass, so tall and thin in that suit. It’s really cool. Where’d you get it?”

  “I got it at Vick’s Vintage,” I said. “There are a couple of other good vintage shops around, if you’re interested.”

  I didn’t think she was, actually. But her expression darkened, and she said, “I’ve heard about Vick. I get the impression he’s quite a character. And every time I drive by his store, it looks like it’s full of musicians.”

  “This town is full of musicians. And it’s full of characters. Vick happens to keep a good stock of vintage guitars and amps as well as clothes. People go by there to check out the inventory, shoot the bull, be seen. The thing you have to bear in mind is that this is Austin. There are more than seventy-five live music clubs, but there’s no big music business. It’s all cottage industry, a big flea market. Lots of clubs and small record labels. Critics, promoters, singers, bass players, songwriters, guitar players. Lots of guitar players. Any night of the week there’s bound to be a dozen clubs that have a guitar player on stage who could be the next Eric Clapton, but he couldn’t tell you the area code of a major record label. In this town, a guy with an answering service and a fax machine is a mogul. Vick Travis is a big fish in this little pond.”

  “That tells me something about Austin,” she said. “But that’s not really what I meant about Vick being a character.”

  I didn’t answer her. Someone had just collapsed next to me and knocked my drink into the sculpture, smashing the Styrofoam cup, drenching my suit. The culprit had friends. They helped him get vertical as I gave him my smashed cup. A guy with a Neanderthal face, short black hair, and an oversized head on a small but raw-boned body in a vintage black tuxedo came over and asked them if they needed any help taking him out. They took one look at his leering face and said no. He gave us a backward glance as he disappeared into the crowd.

  “Speak of the devil,” I said, “that was Vick Travis’s right- hand man, Ed the Head.”

  “I know. He gives me the creeps.” She shivered. It made her breasts jiggle.

  I looked her up and down and bit my lower lip. My body was full of road aches and unsatisfied needs. The music didn’t help. The volume and beat combined with the lights demanded that you give in. Nobody just stood and listened to that stuff. It was dance or fuck off.

  “Damn,” she said. “I think I lost an earring.”

  “Probably happened when that moron fell on you,” I said. “I’ll look for it.” I got down on one knee and scanned the floor.

  “Oh, just forget it,” she said. “It’s just a Melrose Avenue trinket.”

  Something sparkled down there. I scooped it up just before a heavy-soled boot would have come down on it. As I raised back up, my head hit something.

  “Ow!” she exclaimed, cupping her face with her hand. Blood seeped out between her fingers. A giant knot twisted hard in my stomach.

  “I’m sorry. Do you have something?”

  “Here,” she said, handing me her drink. She dug in her purse and got out a wad of travel-size Kleenex. I put the drink down and helped her as much as I could.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said. But in a loud, hot room full of fumes of drugs, smoke, and alcohol, sorry was a very small word. She didn’t try to make me feel any worse, though.

  “It’s all right. My nose bleeds at the drop of a hat.” She daubed it with the Kleenex and looked up at me. That half smile again. Blood glistened on her jacket and dotted my white shirtfront. The strobe lights made the dots dance and change colors.

  “I’m jumpy,” I said. “I need a cigarette. And I still haven’t had a drink.”

  “You can have mine,” she said.

  I took it and had a gulp. “Would you like to leave?”

  She nodded. We started threading our way through the sea of hairdos and elbows and uncertain feet. I didn’t think the tequila and the whiskey would go together on my suit, so I gulped it down before I got slammed again. It was like swallowing a sledgehammer.

  I never liked margaritas.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The ceiling looked familiar.

  The view through the sliding glass door out onto the parking lot and the creek that was below it looked familiar too, even though I was seeing it sideways. Sideways and blurry. An ugly haze seemed to cling to the couch I’d slept on, the sideways fat striped snoring tabby, TV, stereo, thrift shop dinette, and refrigerator. This last sideways item was buzzing quite loudly.

  Down a short hall and to the left was a small room where I had a desk and guitars and amps, to the right was the bathroom, straight back was the bedroom, which was too hot to sleep in during the hot months. The cat was in the middle of the living room floor, lying on his back, which was how he slept during the hot months.

  I was home, and I was a bundle of pain. From my throbbing head and burning eyes and ringing ears to the elephant’s foot on my chest and the bucket of molten lead in my stomach. From the hot steel pincers on the back of my neck to the dull rawness of my gums. I tried to get up but the molten lead sloshed in my stomach and the steel pincers pinched harder and deeper. The phone had been ringing.

  Now someone was knocking at the door.

  The next thing I knew Lasko was standing over me, shaking his head, rubbing his beard.

  “Looks like you all but burned up on reentry,” he said. I was in no condition to look at the large Hawaiian shirt he was wearing. There seemed to be palm trees swaying and waves cresting on it, and that did my nausea no good.

  “Go ’way,” I said. “I don’t feel good.”

  “You don’t look too hot either, Martin. Where’s your bass?”

  “It’s too early for a bass lesson, Lasko. Come back tonight. I know I owe you a couple of sessions, but it’s too damn early.”

  “It’s three in the afternoon. And I didn’t come over here as one of your students. Not even as your friend. I came over here as a cop.”

  I managed to get one elbow under me and tried to focus on his face. He wore a gimme cap with a beer company insignia on the crown. His curly reddish hair was a little long for a cop but not for a plainclothes homicide detective sergeant. He was frowning.

  “I was hoping at least that your bass would be here,” he said.

  The nausea was taking on a life of its own. It moved in a wavelike motion, churning, trying to tell me something. I swung my legs off the couch and managed to get up, shakily. Where was my bass? “Hang on a minute,” I said.

  I stumbled down the hall and leaned inside the office. My spare was in there, but not the Fender. It wasn’t in the bedroom, either. I had a hazy recollection of jamming at a party. But I’d played someone else’s bass. Some Japanese model with computer age electronics and a neck like a two by four. Ugh. Where was my bass? I wouldn’t have left it at the club . . .

  Back in the living room, Lasko hadn’t gotten any cheerier.

  “Know a girl name of Retha Ann Thomas?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. Things were starting to move around in the fog. At first they were just shapes, then they became people, events, places. “I met her last night.
I guess I left it in the trunk of her car.”

  Lasko was shaking his head. He used the toe of one of his cowboy boots to pry one of my shoes out from under the couch, then jerked his head at me. “She’s in a coma with a caved-in head down at Brackenridge ICU. Somebody bashed her up good with a P-bass. Looks an awful lot like yours.”

  “No.” Now I was going to be sick. The carpet seemed to turn to quicksand under my feet. I might never drink again. “Goddamn, there’s blood on your shirt.”

  “I can explain that.”

  “Get your shoes on,” he said.

  &&&

  “We’ve got statements, Mr. Fender,” said the Lieutenant. He looked at me with his bulldog face, twiddling his thumbs over his abdomen. He was flabby and jowl-ridden, old at fifty-five, without an ounce of humor. He was smart as a whip but would act dumb as a rock if that worked better. “Statements that say you really tied one on last night, though I can guess that for myself. Statements that you were with the girl at the bar, that you went with her to the party in Travis Heights. But you can’t say where you went after that party.”

  “I wish I could,” I said. “I just can’t remember.”

  It was a small room and the blinds were drawn. The Lieutenant manned a desk. Lasko sat in a chair to the side of it. I sat in a hard wooden chair, gulping hot bitter coffee, wishing it were all a dream.

  “All right, let’s back up,” said the Lieutenant, looking up from a folder. “It doesn’t say here where you work.”

  “I’m a musician.”

  “We know that.” There was cruel sarcasm in his voice. The bass had turned out to be mine.

  Lasko cleared his throat. “Uh, Lieutenant, Fender here is pretty much a professional musician. Though he does work part- time for a collection agency as a skip tracer.”

  “Hmm. That right?”

  I nodded.