The Broken Promise Land Page 14

  Mig took my bag and stowed it in the Jeep. It was, I noted with some satisfaction, as scabrous as the Ramblin’ Wreck, my ancient Rambler American. I called a thank-you to the pilot, went around to the passenger’s side, and climbed aboard, burning my fingers on the hot metal.

  Great, Rae. It’s bad enough that you’ll be greeting Ricky with a sore right arm and scrapes and bruises that’ll have to be explained. Let’s not try for first-degree burns too.

  Mig started the engine and drove quickly toward the nearby cluster of buildings. The largest was low and rectangular with a squarish open-sided tower at either end. Across a courtyard from it were the smaller buildings, also rectangular and forming a U on three sides of the pool and courts. Cactus and smoky trees with fine branches and gray-green leaves screened their entrances. The architecture was as stark and spare as the desert itself.

  Mig was chattering on about the studio and bungalows and security arrangements. I tuned most of it out till I heard him say, “No reason you shouldn’t feel safe here.”

  No physical reason, maybe, but emotionally I felt like I was walking a tightrope over an alligator pit.

  The bungalow was bigger than the condo I’d leased. Good-sized kitchen and dining area; living room with a stone fireplace and a window overlooking what Mig said was an extinct volcano. Only one bedroom.

  Not too subtle about your intentions, are you, Savage?

  Mig deposited my bag in the bedroom and left. I stayed in the living room. Normally, even though it’s considered bad manners, I like to snoop, but tonight I couldn’t bring myself to invade a very private man’s closets and cupboards. I did take a look at the framed photographs of his family that sat on an end table. Mick, younger, with braces. The handsome fellow I shared an office with had once been a nerd! Two beautiful teenagers—one with long blond hair, the other with a silly brown perm that reminded me of one I’d inflicted on myself at her age. Two towheaded little girls and a boy with hair the color of Ricky’s, ages ranging between maybe seven and twelve; they were sitting on a diving board in bathing suits and looked happy.

  It wasn’t fair, what they’d have to go through in the time ahead. None of it was their fault.

  I picked up the last photograph. A woman with short, stylish blond hair—beautiful like her daughters. Her smile was tentative, though, her eyes questioning.

  Charly, he called her.

  I took the picture over to the lamp on the other table and studied it. Absolutely no resemblance to her sister. Shar’s got what they call a recessive gene, from her Shoshone great-grandmother. The other kids in her family look like California boys and girls, but Shar’s dark and exotic. Still, Charlene was a knockout. So why that wary, unsure expression?

  She’d been hurt, of course. That’s what hurt does to you. Makes you wonder why, and wait for the other shoe to drop. She’d been hurt by the man I’d come here to meet.

  The knot in my stomach retied itself. I put Charlene’s picture back and went to the window. Sun going down in flames behind purple peaks. Maybe my life going down in flames too. Having few surprises had at least been safe—

  Sound of an engine outside, coming closer. The growl and whine of an asshole-creating Porsche as it downshifted. It drove up, cut out, and a door slammed. Footsteps on the sandy ground. I turned as he came inside.

  He looked like hell—tired, sweaty, rumpled. There was a grease streak on his chin and a line of dried blood on his cheek where, he had told me, Charlene slapped him. And his expression said he’d about given up hope of anything going right.

  Come-fuck-me voice, come-bury-me look.

  But when he saw me his eyes lit up. “Hey, Red.”

  All of a sudden I couldn’t speak. By some strange biological function the knot in my stomach had traveled upward and was threatening to strangle me. I backed up against the window. The glass was air-conditioned chilly, but I could feel the heat outside.

  Ricky smiled in his crooked way and cocked his head quizzically. “What’s the matter, Red? You’re not gonna get scared of me all over again?”

  He was a superstar who’d stepped on plenty of people to get to the top. He was a cheating husband who’d put that look on his wife’s face and probably didn’t even see it. He was a dad who was about to abandon his family. And he was about to do his damndest to bed me.

  But he was also just Ricky: the Bakersfield kid who’d dreamed of stardom and then found out it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The kid who’d worked his ass off since he was twelve to support his music habit. The only son who’d been all that stood between his mother and his drunken, abusive father. The loner who’d escaped into his lyrics and melodies. The man who right now was toting a heavy load of pain and guilt.

  Just Ricky.

  I stepped away from the window and put my arms around him. Went up on tiptoe and pressed my cheek to his.

  “Thank God you’re here, Red,” he whispered.

  I still couldn’t speak, so I just held him tight.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen with us,” he said, “but I’ll promise you this: I’ll never deliberately do anything to hurt you. I’m through with that kind of life.”

  We were lying side by side in bed when I asked him the big question—not the one Shar wanted me to ask, but my own: “Are you with me tonight because you want to get back at Charly?”

  He put his arms around me and pulled me halfway on top of him so I could look into his eyes. “No,” he said, “I am not. If I wanted to get back at her, right now I’d be in some high-visibility nightspot in L.A. or I’d be in San Diego, fucking my brains out with her best friend, who’s made the generous offer more than once and would be on the phone to everybody we know before I could get my pants back on.

  “I’m here in Arizona,” he added, “because I need the healing power of the desert. And I’m here with you because I care for you, plain and simple.”

  Tears stung my eyes. One slipped over, and he brushed it away. “You’re not gonna cry, are you? Crying women always make me cry, too.”

  “No, I’m not going to. I hate to cry, except when I want to get my own way.”

  “Good. I’m not a pretty sight when I weep. So are we settled on that issue?”

  “… That one, yes.”

  “There’s something else?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Tell me.”

  I rolled off him and looked up into the dusky, filtered light. “Ricky, do you trust me?”

  “You know I do.” But his tone was now guarded.

  Shar says that when in doubt, take a big risk. I’d always hated that philosophy, but right then I understood the impulse.

  I said, “If you trust me, tell me about Patricia Terriss.”

  The silence seemed to stretch out for hours. Finally he leaned over, took a joint from the nightstand drawer, and lighted it. After a moment he said tightly, “People sure’re tossing that name around today.”

  “Is she the same woman who was hassling you three years ago?”

  He passed me the joint. “So you know about that, too. Shar must’ve found out from my old friend Letta James. Funny, I didn’t even remember that I told Letta till I was driving over here. That’s how wrecked I was at the time. But I don’t remember telling her Patricia’s name.”

  “Shar overheard you and Charlene arguing about her.”

  “How’d Charly know, I wonder?”

  “She found the bill from the lawyer you consulted about Terriss.”

  “When?”

  “About a year ago.”

  He took the joint from my fingers, drew on it. “So that’s what ended it—Charly jumping to conclusions without bothering to ask me about it.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Actually, it was over before that; we just weren’t letting ourselves believe it. You know how some random event can happen and all of a sudden nothing in your life’s ever the same? With Charly and me, it was the fire in Pacific Palisades. We’d survived so much do
wn the years, but for some reason that sank us. Afterward, we never could find our way back to each other.”

  I took the joint and dragged down some smoke. Grass has never affected me very strongly; I guess I’m like a cat that doesn’t respond to catnip. But I was feeling a little mellower, mellow enough to ask, “So what about the Terriss woman, Ricky?”

  He tensed and shifted away from me. “Is that why you agreed to come down here—so you could pry into my personal affairs? Is that why you went to bed with me?”

  “You know it isn’t. I’m here because I want to be. I’m in bed with you because I care. And I don’t want anything to happen to you—or your family.”

  “What can happen? We’re all surrounded by guards—who’re costing me a fast fortune.”

  “Well, you saw how much the guards could do to prevent that shooting last night. And you can’t live this way forever. Besides, there’re some other things that Shar didn’t get the chance to tell you.” I explained about the heap of Carolina jessamine that had been left in his trailer at the concert, as well as the intruder who had grabbed me at Coso Street.

  He sat up. “Somebody threatened you?”

  “Yes. And then there’s the CD of Letta James’s Old-fashioned Lady that turned up with Jamie’s other birthday presents. A note in the same handwriting as the others was attached, telling her to listen to ‘My Mendacious Minstrel.’”

  “Jesus, and somebody tried to get to my daughter!”

  “That’s how serious the situation is. Whoever’s doing this has an in in your household. Can get onto your property. Can follow you. Can breach security at concerts.”

  He put the joint out in an ashtray and lay back down and took my hand. “Okay, you’ve convinced me. I’ll tell you all of it. But you’re not going to like what you hear. I don’t want it to change things with us, Red. What’s starting here is too important for that.”

  “We won’t let it change anything.” But the knot was back in my stomach—tighter than before.

  “Okay, here it is. All of it. I was in Austin. Concert date there, another scheduled for Houston the next night, and then on to Dallas. Three years ago, in the springtime. After the show, we went out. Whole bunch of us—my lead guitarist, Dan, and my bass player, Benjy. The concert promoter. My road manager, Rats. The band that opened for us. The place was on a lake north of town; they showcased up-and-coming local talent. This woman, Patricia Terriss, was singing with the band. She was beautiful, really beautiful, but she had a tiny talent. When they finished they came over to meet us, had some drinks at our table. And I…

  “Red, that was in the middle of a purely miserable time with Charly. I’m not trying to make excuses for what I did—or maybe I am—but there was this beautiful, willing woman that I didn’t have any bad history with, and I ended up back at the hotel with her. The next day I took her along to Houston, and then to Dallas.”

  I realized I was clutching his hand too hard and eased up some. “And after Dallas?”

  “I left her there with a first-class plane ticket back to Austin. We parted on what I thought were good terms. Too good, maybe. Two weeks later she called my office line at the house in Pacific Palisades, told me she was in L.A., asked if we could get together. God knows how she got the number. I said it wouldn’t be a good idea. But she kept calling. After a couple more weeks she called the house line. As soon as she did that I had both numbers changed. Then the notes started. I don’t know how she got my address, either.”

  “What did they say?”

  “More of what she’d said on the phone. That she loved me, wanted to be with me. That I’d promised to leave Charly, write her a song, make her a star. Next, presents started coming. Expensive and personal stuff. Once she even sent flowers. I explained them away as a joke from somebody at the label.”

  Ricky’s hand had tightened on mine now. I ran my thumb over his index finger, trying—and failing—to ease his tension.

  “The next thing,” he went on, “was threats. She’d tell Charly about us. She’d tell my kids about us. She knew where we lived; she could get at us anytime. God, the thought made my skin crawl! And then… then she threatened to hurt the kids. That was what had me so messed up the day I ran into my old friend Letta.”

  It made my skin crawl, too. “Is that when you went to see the lawyer?”

  “Yes. All he could tell me was to get a restraining order. But he also told me that a restraining order probably wouldn’t work if she was as crazy as she sounded. And then he…”

  Something very bad was coming. I could feel it.

  “He told me that the only thing somebody like that understands is ‘a substantial show of force.’”

  Oh, God! “Meaning?”

  “Hiring somebody to rough her up and persuade her to leave me alone. He said he could put me in touch with the right man for the job.”

  “Ricky, you didn’t—”

  “No. I’d done a lot of things in my life that I wasn’t proud of, but hiring some thug—” He broke off. I glanced at him, saw his eyes were bleak. “What I did was worse.”

  I closed my own eyes, waited.

  “Worse, because it was so personal.”

  I kept waiting.

  Finally he said, “I set her up, God help me. Called her at the number she always put at the bottom of her notes. Told her I was ready to leave Charly. Made a date for a motel up the coast in Ventura; told her to register under her own name and then phone me at Transamerica with the room number. And sent in my place two men she knew from when we were in Texas—my good buddies, Dan and Benjy.”

  In a weak voice I asked, “To do what?”

  “Whatever it took, Red. Whatever it took. And they did.”

  “Did what?” I was whispering now.

  “I don’t know. They wouldn’t say, and I could tell they didn’t feel good about it. No matter how hard I pushed, they never would talk about it. But she stopped bothering me. I didn’t hear from or of her again.

  “I’ll tell you,” he added, “since the morning Dan and Benjy came to the house and said everything was taken care of, I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep. I guess I won’t be able to live with myself till I find out what happened in that motel room. And when I do, I may never be able to live with myself again.”

  Six in the morning, and I was standing at the window watching the now-cool desert turn gold. Ricky stirred in the bed behind me, and after a minute he came over and put his hands on my shoulders. “What’re you thinking, Red?”

  “That we ought to go back to San Diego. You want to tell Shar in person what you told me.”

  “… Yeah, I guess I better. We can leave whenever you’re ready.”

  “You all right to drive?”

  “For now. If I start to crash on the way, you can take over.”

  I’d never driven a Porsche. I wondered if I’d turn into an asshole behind the wheel.

  Ricky asked, “You okay?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Are we okay?”

  I tilted my head and rested my cheek against his right hand. “We’re okay.”

  “Then let’s go back to San Diego, turn this whole thing over to Shar, and get on with the rest of our lives.”

  PART TWO

  July 24–26, 1995

  “StarWatch,” Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1995:

  Music industry insiders are buzzing about this weekend’s sudden appearance of armed guards at country artist Ricky Savage’s estate in the San Diego hills. Adding fuel to the speculation is the presence of Savage’s sister-in-law, San Francisco private eye Sharon McCone, and Hy Ripinsky, partner in the well-known antiterrorism security firm that supplied the muscle. But where is the two-time Grammy winner and 1994 Country Music Entertainer of the Year, whose double-platinum Broken Promise Land album debuted at the top of the charts last season? No one knows. Savage, who was seen departing a benefit concert in Sonoma County Friday night in the company of an attractive redhead, left home Sunday morning after an
altercation with his wife and has not yet surfaced…

  July 24, 1995:

  What have you DONE…?

  Thirteen

  The fax from Kurt Girdwood’s L.A. office came in on Ricky’s machine at eight-forty Monday morning, only minutes after Rae called to say they were on the road and would be checking into a small hotel in La Jolla around eleven. My brother-in-law, she added, was ready to tell me all about Patricia Terriss, but he wanted to do so in person. I told her to call when they got settled; then the fax buzzed and I hung up and went to see what was coming through.

  Underneath the item from the Times gossip column, the manager—who had returned to L.A. yesterday afternoon—had scrawled, “McCone—How the fuck did your people let this leak?” And beneath the words in the now-familiar handwriting, he’d added, “And what the fuck does this mean?”

  I stared at the page, my spirits—which hadn’t been any too high to begin with—sinking rapidly. Everything was veering out of control; I was powerless to stop it, and now Ricky’s manager was blaming me for the fact that someone who had been at the estate on Sunday had tipped the media. And this latest note… How had Girdwood gotten hold of it?

  I went to the desk to phone him, but before I could hit the automatic dial the door opened and Mick came in. His jeans and tee looked as though he’d slept in them; his red eyes looked as though he hadn’t slept at all. He asked, “Have you heard anything from Dad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “He’s on his way back from Arizona.”

  “But not to the house.”

  “No.”

  His lips tightened, then he shrugged. “Maybe it’s better that way. I don’t think anybody here’s especially fond of him at the moment.”

  Charlene and I had agreed it would not be a sides-taking situation. Mick, Chris, and Jamie differed on that point.

  “What’s this?” Before I could stop him he picked up the fax I’d set on the desk. “Oh, great,” he said as he read it. “Way to go, Dad. Now the whole world knows. And this at the bottom—it’s another one of those notes, right?”