Дональд Уэстлейк - Baby, Would I Lie?

“Damocles.”

“No, that was the sword. Anyway, you know what I mean, and he only had one sword hanging over him. I got two.”

“Ray, let sleeping dogs lie.”

“Leon ‘The Prick’ is not sleeping, Jolie. We got the weekend, no trial going on. Call him and set us up a meeting tomorrow, anytime he wants.”

“For God’s sake, Ray, why?”

“I wanna know what the details are.”

“You never did before.”

“I do now . I want to know what our position is, and I want to know what their position is, and I want to know what’s between them.”

“A space the size of the solar system.”

“So maybe we can move inward a couple planets, get some motion going here.”

“Ray, you’ll say the wrong thing, you know that. That’s why you let me handle all this—”

“I won’t, Jolie, I swear to God, I promise on a stack of Bibles, Boy Scout’s honor, whatever you want. This time, I’ll be good.”

“I don’t like it, Ray.”

“That’s okay, Jolie. Just do it.”

So she just did it, frowning massively all the way, and that meant, at 11:00 A.M. on Saturday, with the world outside a massed and colorful chorus of tourists in polyester, Ray and Jolie entered the Table Rock Dam substation offices and were shown to Leon “The Prick” Caccatorro’s lair, where Leon himself awaited them like a vampire.

Leon “T P” was a cadaverous man in his forties who wore his dead father’s dark suits, cut down to more or less fit. He wore his father’s white shirts, too, and his father had had twice the neck of Leon “T P,” so behind the tight knots of his father’s wide dark ties, the old frayed white cloth could be seen to bunch and pucker, well in front of T P’s Adam’s apple.

This apparition’s bat cave, on the second floor of the substation offices, somehow never seemed to draw the sun. There were three rooms set aside here for T P and his crew of three: The Prick’s own den, an outer reception office, and a small conference room. The other three members of The Prick’s gang were a secretary, an accountant, and a guy who stood around a lot, maybe waiting for a bus, but none of them mattered. Only Leon “T P” Caccatorro himself mattered.

The Prick ushered Ray and Jolie into the conference room, where they all sat around the oval table, The Prick and the accountant on one side and Ray and Jolie on the other. The secretary stayed in the reception office, and the other guy was somewhere around, waiting for a bus.

Jolie got the ball rolling: “Ray here, as you know, doesn’t have much of a business head. That’s how he got into this mess in the first place, taking bad advice from people who should have known better. So he’s let me try to handle the situation for him, but you know he’s got other problems as well—”

“We know,” Leon “The Prick” acknowledged.

“And I think it’s getting to him,” Jolie said. “So he wanted to come here today, meet with you, find out exactly what the situation is.”

“It’s a quite simple situation,” T P said. “Ray Jones owes the government money, and the government wants it.”

“Well, it’s not quite that simple,” Jolie said. “Let’s not go back to square one here. On the one side, we’ve got the original indebtedness, plus judgments, interest, and penalties, all still piling on. On the other side, we have reality.”

T P’s lips moved in what might have been a smirk. “And what,” he asked, “is reality?”

“Ray Jones is finite,” Jolie said. “He has only so much money; he has only so many more songs in him; he has only so much life expectancy. The government, speaking realistically, is never going to get the full amount of tax owing, plus interest, plus penalties, and you know it as well as I do. The question is, then. What will the government accept as full recompense, and in what form will the government accept that recompense?”

Ray said, “Jolie? What do you mean, what form? Money’s money, isn’t it?”

“Copyrights in songs are an asset,” she told him. “Royalties, future royalties from past records, that’s another asset. Royalties from performance of your songs by other artists, that’s another.”

T P added with ghoulish relish, “Box-office receipts from your theater. Product-endorsement payments.”

“Don’t have any of those right now,” Ray said.

“You have had in the past,” T P reminded him. “Beer, at one point, I believe, and wasn’t it sausage?”

“And the Interstate Bus Company,” Ray said. “They’d be real distressed if you forgot that one.”

“I won’t forget anything, Mr. Jones,” T P said, and smiled that smile again. His teeth were small and narrow and crooked, but they looked sharp.

Ray felt Jolie’s warning eye on him, and he didn’t respond anymore, just sat back and nodded and tried to look like a sober businessman. The conversation went on without him, mostly Jolie and T P batting it back and forth, with occasional footnotes from the accountant, and what it all came down to was: Ray Jones’s money, for the purposes of this discussion, separated into three categories. First, there was money still coming in on songs he’d already written and/or recorded, and small residuals from reruns of TV shows he’d been on. Second, there was whatever money he was earning right now, at the theater in downtown Branson and through his Best Hits album sales on late-night TV. And third, there was future income, from those first two sources and also from any new songs Ray might take it into his head to write and/or record.

The difference between Jolie and T P was that Jolie wanted to pay the government mostly out of the first category of money, earnings derived from the past, with a little topping up of the tanks for a while from present earnings, while T P wanted a part of anything Ray might do in the future. In Jolie’s plan, in other words, which Ray liked insofar as he could like anything to do with this cock-up, the government would get half a loaf and then be out of Ray’s hair forever. In T P’s plan, the government would be in his pocket for all eternity, his partner. The impasse was caused, on the one side, by Jolie and Ray’s absolute refusal to let the government be Ray’s permanent partner and, on the other side, by the government’s greedy belief that the real gold was in them thar future hills. Until T P could be distracted from the future by a demonstration that the past would eventually generate enough income to satisfy the bulk of the debt, the impasse would continue.

As it did today, for close to an hour, back and forth, Jolie and T P clearly disliking one another but both being formal, both finding endless ways to restate the same old positions, endless ways to try to make the same old positions sound like new positions, like compromises of some sort. Round and round the maypole they went, and then Ray decided it was time to make his move. “Leon,” he said, “let’s cut through the crap, okay? Mind if I call you Leon?”

“Not at all,” Leon said, squinting and showing those sharp little teeth.

“I’ll put you a proposition,” Ray said.

Jolie, alarmed, said, “Ray? We haven’t discussed this.”

“That’s okay, Jolie,” Ray said, giving her a look of exasperated sincerity. “But none of you people’s getting anywhere, and this whole thing’s running me down. It’s bad publicity, for one thing, on top of the bad publicity about the trial, and I’ve had enough bad publicity; it’s gonna hurt me with the fans. And it’s buggin me, too, goin on for years, affecting how I sleep, how I eat, how I digest my flapjacks.”

Jolie said, “Ray, for God’s—”

“No, Jolie,” Ray said. “That’s why I wanted this meeting, get myself an idea when this thing is gonna be over , and I can see right now, the way it’s going, it ain’t never gonna be over.” Looking at T P, Ray said, “It ain’t ever gonna be over because you can’t go into court and enforce a judgment against me while we’re still in this bullshit good-faith negotiation, because if you could go into court and whomp me, you’da done it last year. You wanna correct me on that, Mr. Leon?”