The Broken Promise Land Read online

  “What?”

  “The effect this situation could have if it was made public on my upcoming tour for the Midnight Train to Nowhere album and the new label.”

  “How so?”

  He got up and began to pace around the office, his booted footfalls soft on the carpet. “The recording industry has changed, Shar—at least on the surface. Was a time when I could stagger onto the stage in my jacket and jeans, hair down to my ass, high as a kite, and nobody saw anything wrong with it. That’s out now, and it’s probably a good thing, because the dope and booze weren’t doing it for me anymore, and my doing so much of them sure wasn’t doing anything for my family. No, what’s in now is credibility.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Personal integrity. You’ve gotta be worthy of the respect of your audience and peers. You gotta do good works—benefits for this or that cause, like this thing tonight in Sonoma County. You gotta help along the less fortunate—like my opening act tonight, that piss-ant Maxima.” He snorted.

  “Maxima? Sounds like a Japanese car.”

  “Stands for maximizing your potential and all that crap. The band’s four guys and a girl singer. You read their press, you’ll find out they’re about all the correct things: antidrug, antibooze, anticrime, anti-premarital sex. They’re vegetarians, pro–animal rights, pro–the environment. And they’ve got a nice ethnic mix: two blacks, two whites, and a Native American.”

  “So why’re they ‘piss-ant’?”

  “Because that’s only their public image. In private they eat meat, do booze and drugs, and the girl singer hops from one guy’s bed to another’s. For all I know, they litter, pollute, and torture cats. But because of a good publicity campaign, they got cred.”

  “Then why do they need you to help them?”

  “Because their music sucks and their records don’t sell.”

  “And why are you helping them?”

  “We’ve got the same booking agent.”

  “Oh.”

  Ricky went on, “Anyway, the industry has gotten so faux honorable that I could puke. The music critics buy into it and parcel out praise accordingly. Of course, the business is still rotten to the core, but who the hell cares about anything that’s not strictly surface, right?”

  He was pacing in a long, angry stride now—more lively than I’d seen him in quite some time. Get mad, Ricky, I silently urged him. Show me some of that spirit that sustained you during those early years of frustration and rejection.

  “So are you credible?” I asked.

  “I sure as hell am. I’m doing the goddamned benefit for victims’ rights tonight, aren’t I? Not that I’m against victims’ rights, but it happens to be Jamie’s fifteenth birthday and I would’ve liked to be home for it. And I’m letting that piss-ant Maxima open for me, aren’t I? Don’t I give money to save the whales and the rain forests and the spotted owl? Hell, I don’t even know what a spotted owl looks like. Where does it all end, I ask you? Given the new political climate in the country, by this time next year my agent’ll be signing me up to do benefit concerts against the spotted owl!”

  Abruptly he stopped pacing and leaned across the desk toward me. “You know, what really pisses me off about acts like Maxima is that I come by my credibility honestly. Part of the cred thing is that the artist’s supposed to suffer. Hell, we’re supposed to bleed. Everybody knows the story of those years I spent playing clubs in places like Needles and Wichita and Saginaw, staring at the ass end of some broken-down, third-rate singer whose road agent’d hired me at less than union scale. I’ve never been on the receiving end of help from anybody in the industry. No hit act ever let me open for them; nobody ever put on a benefit concert for my hungry wife and kids. But those years’re finally worth something: Ricky Savage has paid his dues, bigtime. He’s got everybody’s respect, hot damn!”

  He was on a roll now, translating his anxiety about the current situation into anger. Easier for him to cope with, probably.

  I said, “So if word of these notes got out to the media, the speculation about what’s behind them might harm your credibility. And if something really nasty surfaced, it could blow the Midnight Train tour, damage the new label, and possibly wreck your career.”

  “Yes to all of that.”

  I moved back to the desk and leaned my forearms on it, toying with my letter opener for a moment. “Okay, then let me ask you this: Is there anything nasty that could come out?”

  I’d thought the question might further anger him, but instead he sat down and considered. “There’s stuff. There’s stuff in everybody’s life, and more than the average amount in a performer’s. But I can’t think of anything that would relate to those notes.”

  I waited to see if he’d elaborate, but he didn’t seem so inclined. “Well,” I said, “I’ll get started on it right away.”

  “I’m surprised you’re willing to take it on.”

  “Why on earth wouldn’t I?”

  “Charly wasn’t too sure. To quote my wife, ‘Sharon might feel there’s a problem with working for a family member. Don’t pressure her if she says no; she’s got very strict professional ethics.’”

  My face must have reflected my astonishment; Ricky smiled wryly.

  I asked, “Does this mean I’ve got… what do you call it? Cred?”

  “You got more than cred. According to Charly, you’re practically in line for sainthood.”

  Oh, little sister, if only you knew! If only you knew…

  Two

  Ricky and I settled contractual details and he gave me a retainer that I felt vaguely guilty for taking from a family member. Only vaguely.

  Going out on my own the year before had been scary enough, but I’d still been under the umbrella of All Souls, whose partners would have forgiven a late rental payment for the rooms in their Bernal Heights Victorian that my nephew Mick and I occupied. And Mick was working for free in exchange for room and board at my house—sent north by Charlene and Ricky to remove him from the scene of a dreadful transgression involving the Pacific Palisades Board of Education’s computer. The overhead was low, the surroundings congenial, and it seemed I had all the time in the world to start generating a profit.

  But this spring All Souls had rounded the last curve of a steadily downward spiral: Infighting among the partners became fierce and disruptive; Hank Zahn, the co-op’s founder and my oldest friend, decided to leave and form his own firm with his wife, Anne-Marie Altman. And I, flying high and reckless on the wings of a quarter-million-dollar reward I’d received for services rendered to the federal government, agreed to set up shop next door to them.

  Now I had a full suite of offices and an unforgiving landlord. I had new and costly equipment, as well as a nearly new fuel-guzzling company van. Add to that salaries and Social Security and health-plan contributions for two and a half employees, and you had a situation that bore a frightening resemblance to a house of cards. True, most of the reward was tucked away in various conservative and easily liquidated investments, but I’d been poor for far too many of the years I worked at All Souls to let a dollar flow out without fretting.

  “Are we all set for this evening?” I asked Ricky as I countersigned our contract.

  “Yeah. Do any of your office gang suspect our surprise?”

  “I don’t think so. They’ve been working too hard at weaseling it out of me.”

  “Mick might. He said something about somebody he wants me to meet tonight. You have any idea who that could be?”

  I did: Charlotte Keim, one of the data-search specialists with Hy’s firm. And that was something else to fret about. Instead of going into it now, I simply said no.

  “Then I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.” He got up and moved toward the door.

  “Ricky, one more thing. Do your partners or any of your other people know about the notes?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Like I said before, I can’t really trust anybody in the industry
. I learned that early on.”

  “So who does know?”

  “Only you and Charly.”

  I would have liked to ask what my sister thought about them. She was a passionate and possessive woman; throughout their marriage she and Ricky had done some heavy-duty battling over what might or might not go on in the part of his life from which she, by choice, distanced herself. Surely she’d considered the possibility they might be from a woman.

  He must have read the question in my eyes. He said softly, “I don’t know what Charly thinks about anything these days, Shar.”

  “Things aren’t good?”

  He shrugged, pain twisting his lips and melancholy creeping across his face. “We’ll talk about it later, okay? Right now I want to go say hello to my son before I head out.” At the door he paused. “By the way, I don’t want Mick to know about any of this. Don’t use him on the investigation, okay?”

  I frowned. His son was my computer jock and invaluable in gathering essential background information. If I couldn’t use him I’d have to temporarily hire someone else.

  “I know you rely on him,” Ricky said, “but this is one time when you’re going to have to get along without his help.”

  I nodded and watched him leave, then slouched in my chair and stared moodily at the single blackish-red rose in the bud vase on my desk—a gift from Hy that arrived without fail every Tuesday morning. This week’s offering was a little worse for the wear, due to the unseasonable heat we’d been experiencing.

  Ricky’s insistence that Mick not be used on the investigation bothered me, but not for the inconvenience it would cause. In fact, now that I thought about it I realized it would be unprofessional to turn this job into a family affair; it was bad enough that I had such a personal stake in it. Probably I should have referred my brother-in-law to another investigator, but I hadn’t wanted to entrust the Savage family’s problem to someone else. And Ricky, with his mania for privacy, might not have gone along with that, anyway. No, I’d been right to take the case, just as he’d been right to ask that his son be excluded.

  But his asking had implications I didn’t like. Was there some, as he put it, stuff in his life so nasty that he wasn’t owning up to it? Would my investigation open a can of worms that would eat away at the family? It already sounded as though all was not paradise in their brand-new twelve-thousand-square-foot home in the hills above La Jolla. Odd that neither Mick nor I had picked up on that when we were down there the month before for their housewarming party. Or maybe it wasn’t so odd; like most offspring, Mick tended to view his parents as immutable, and I, in spite of frequent evidence to the contrary, tended to idealize Charlene’s and Ricky’s union.

  He’d spotted her from the bandstand at a high-school dance where the group he’d formed with four Bakersfield buddies was playing: hot, easy Charlene McCone, with her long blond hair and her ripe figure, a sixteen year old with a reputation for giving a good time. That night, after she ditched her date and waited around while the band packed up, he made love to her in the back of their van. She spent two afternoons with him in his cheap motel room, and when he left San Diego he made no promises. He’d be back, Charlene told me. Ricky was the man she’d marry; no more screwing around for her.

  Charlene never even accepted another date.

  By the time Ricky returned, she was four months pregnant, radiant, and not the least bit worried. She broke the news to him right away, and the next night he appeared at our house wearing a suit jacket that was inches too short at the wrists and carrying a velvet-covered box containing a cheap wedding band. He was pale, a little drunk, and a whole lot determined. And during what had to have been the most harrowing conversation of his young life, he persuaded my staunchly Catholic mother and my irascible ex-military father that he would be a good husband to their little girl.

  He had been, in his own way.

  The early years of their marriage were rough. Ricky was on the road a lot, and he and Charlene developed a reproductive pattern that would have made the Pope smile in contentment. After Mick was born, Ricky temporarily gave up on his own band and signed on with a Nashville booking agency; the agency sent him off on an extended tour with a group quite appropriately called The Missing Link. Ma and Pa were concerned. Don’t be, Charlene told them, he’d be back. And he was—several months later, when he got her pregnant again. He stayed around working with his own band on demo tapes of his songs until Mick’s baby sister Chris was several weeks into two o’clock feedings, and then he hit the road again.

  He’d be back, Charlene said serenely.

  The pattern repeated until there were six of what the family fondly called the Little Savages. By that point even my devout Catholic mother was urging Charlene to get her tubes tied; my sister had to admit it was an idea whose time had come. And the Savage family’s lives continued down a marginal track, involving food stamps and substandard housing and generous contributions from relatives, that we all feared would eventually land them on a sewer grating.

  And then Ricky Savage suddenly became a household music name.

  He managed it with the help of my father, who over the years had observed his struggle toward his dream and come to respect and admire him. Pa didn’t know much about music—aside from the dirty ballads he liked to bellow while puttering in his garage workshop—but as a career enlisted man in the navy, he did know something about courage in the face of adversity. So, on the promise that if Ricky didn’t succeed this time he’d give it up and go to work for my brother John’s house-painting company, Pa loaned him and his band members the money to cut one last high-quality demo tape of four songs, including a catchy new one called “Cobwebs in the Attic of My Mind.” Ricky hand-carried the tape to his booking agent in Nashville; the agent listened to it, called a friend in A & R—Artist and Repertoire—at Transamerica Records, and within months both the resultant album and the single of “Cobwebs” had shot to the top of the country charts.

  Ricky’s success continued. After a number of hits relying on hooks with an architectural theme—“The House Where Love Once Lived,” “You Can Get Me Out of Your Bedroom, But You Can’t Get Me Out of Your Heart”—he went on to write songs that the critics found as good as anything currently being written. Emotional and frequently profound, they told stories that touched both the mind and the heart. And, more important for his record label, they won award after award and frequently crossed over to the highly desirable pop charts.

  Ricky’s sudden transformation to superstar wasn’t easy on the Savages. With it came too many possessions, too many changes, too little privacy, too little time. The kids became acquisitive and rebellious; Charlene became insecure and depressed; Ricky became bewildered as to how he could possibly be failing them now. But through it all he and Charlene stuck together, drawing on their reserves of good sense to keep the family from going completely haywire. They weathered one son’s learning disability, and Ma and Pa’s divorce, the tragic deaths of both of Ricky’s parents and two of his band members, the destruction of their Pacific Palisades home by wildfire. Oh, there were moments when it looked as though they wouldn’t make it. Such as the time she flew to Las Vegas to surprise him and caught him in bed with the singer from his opening act. Such as the time he came home unexpectedly, tracked her down at a restaurant rendezvous with an old flame, and created such a commotion that the cops were called. But through it all they loved each other, and they loved their kids.

  So what had gone wrong that could cause such pain and sadness to cross Ricky’s face? What could be so bad that my sister hadn’t confided the trouble to me?

  I reached for the phone. Stopped myself and shook my head.

  Not your business, McCone—yet. Let him tell you about it in his own way and time. And then offer aid and comfort to them both.

  I made up a case file, stapled the contract we’d just signed inside, and put it in my active investigations drawer. Then I fished out a work request form for a laboratory I often used. After
checking boxes that indicated I wanted the notes examined for fingerprints and paper and ink type, as well as analyzed by a graphologist, I enveloped them, grabbed my purse, and went along the catwalk to see Ted Smalley.

  Our offices ran along the side of the pier, fronted by a wide railed catwalk with stairways at either end and crossover catwalks to the offices opposite. Below, on the floor where forklifts used to move cargo, we parked our cars. The opposite tenants were a firm of architects for whom I’d done some investigating, and a graphic designer. The lower suites contained a similarly diverse group of people whom I was only now getting to know. It was trés urban chic to have one’s offices in a renovated pier, and the tenants were all quite house proud: The doors to the various establishments were painted in individual colors and styles, and their signs ranged from elaborate to expensively discreet; plants in barrels and redwood tubs flanked the foot of each stairway, straining to grow in the dim light of the cavernous space.

  I loved the pier; I loved the southeastern Embarcadero and the lively South Beach district. I hoped we’d be here for a long, long time.

  I passed the spacious room next to my office—workplace of Mick and Rae Kelleher, my former assistant at All Souls and the first of what I hoped would be many operatives. Next to that was a somewhat smaller space, temporarily used for storage. The adjoining conference room, which we shared with Altman & Zahn, contained only the old round oak table and chairs that used to sit by the kitchen window at the co-op. Between it and the law offices was the domain of Ted Smalley, our shared manager, whom we’d easily lured away from the corporate shell that remained after Hank left All Souls.

  Ted, a fine-featured dark-haired man with a penetrating gaze and neat goatee, presided over our new realm much as a feudal lord over his fiefdom—ruling with an iron hand and providing much-needed guidance to his subjects, who were foolish enough to think themselves his employers. The fact that he displayed a fondness for fancy ruffled shirts and opulent old-fashioned waistcoats—offset somewhat by the accompanying Levi’s—did much to further the image.