Дональд Уэстлейк: Baby, Would I Lie?

The best way for me to thank my friends in Branson is not to mention them by name: You know who you are. Thanks for the use of the driveway, the house, the bus, the restaurant, the laughter.

For Chris and Susan Newman, who at the beginning pointed and said, “Look!” (and whispered, “Fried,”), and who at the end, pointed out (some of) my errors, they can put my devoted thanks in with their knowledge that without them this book could never have been written; they’re just going to have to live with that.

To the country balladeers of yesterday and today, singer-songwriters who perfected the art of describing the rougher road, my unfeigned and uncomplicated admiration; my poor efforts on your turf herein are mere homage.

As to the tabloidoids, they’re as scurrilous as ever.

Sara drove out of the wilderness. Inside the purring air-conditioned Buick Skylark, a rental from the airport, she rolled southward from Springfield through the tumbled Ozarks, more a furrowed plateau than a mountain range, on toward the new home of country music, forty miles away: Branson, Missouri.

The early-afternoon sun stood high in the hazy sky ahead, beckoning her on. The road at first was wide and flat, two lanes on either side of a broad median, but as she plunged deeper into the scrubby hills, it curved and twisted and rose and fell like life itself. Soon it narrowed from four lanes to three, and sometimes, two. Often she was stuck behind campers and mobile homes, sometimes behind pickup trucks, occasionally behind larger older American cars; whenever a passing zone appeared, she whipped on by, leaving the American flag decals and NRA decals and half-scratched-off Desert Storm decals and comical bumper stickers — “I’M SO TIRED I’M RETIRED” — in her wake, and kept driving south.

All around her, the Ozark hills mounded like hairy bellies, scrub grass clinging tenaciously to the hard, stony ground, as though she were steering the Buick across a mastodon with mange. In clumps on the sunlit tan landscape, there were trees, gnarled and twisted and shallow-rooted and dark of leaf and branch, hunched like covens of malevolent witches, watching her progress, cackling as she sped by.

Deciding to steep herself in local color — she was an investigative reporter, wasn’t she? — Sara switched on the radio and immediately heard, “... favorite from Ray Jones, one of Branson’s own,” in a young and twangy voice.

Ray Jones — the reason she was here. Think of that. There’s an omen for you.

According to the background material she’d read in the plane — two planes; change at St. Louis — Ray Jones used to be a major country-and-western star, a singer-songwriter with a long string of hits and a large following. But it had been ten years since he’d made the charts with a new record (tape, disc), and, in fact, his career had now reached the point where collections of his greatest successes were offered for sale on late-night TV. Like a number of similar entertainers, men and women with a hit-making past and a residue of loyal fans and continuing name recognition but with no recent or likely new successes to keep the career fueled, Ray Jones had opened his own theater, sensibly enough called the Ray Jones Country Theater, down in the new home of old country music: Branson, Missouri.

This was all a brand-new world to Sara Joslyn, intrepid girl reporter of New York’s Trend magazine, but that’s what investigative reporting is all about, isn’t it? New worlds.

“We wish old Ray the best in his current trouble...”

Oh sure. His current trouble, old Ray, was that he was on trial for a particularly gruesome sex murder; it would take a good old boy to wish him the best, wouldn’t it? I should be taping this, Sara thought, but it was already too late. The disc jockey was introducing the song: “Here’s one of Ray’s biggest hits — ‘Baby, Would I Lie?’ ”

“You’re kidding,” Sara told the radio. A bouncy country intro began, the up-front drums and electric guitars elaborated by a subtle background of trombone-saxophone riffs.

“Turn that fucking thing off.”

“But it’s you, Ray.”

“I’ve heard me,” Ray Jones said, and shuffled the cards.

It was a gravelly voice, smoky, whiskey-flavored. It was a barroom-brawling voice, a woman-cheating voice, a drunk-tank voice:

“Yes,” Sara said.

“Count on it,” Sara said.

It’s a put-on, Sara thought, but then she thought, I bet it isn’t.

It’s too blatant to be a put-on, Sara thought. With that voice, that honky-tonk music thudding along in the background, it’s supposed to be taken seriously. Do the fans take it seriously? What do they think it’s about? Is this irony, or is it real? Does Ray Jones know?

“My God,” Sara said, and the sign by the road said Branson in seven miles.

Ray Jones looked at his hole cards. “Not my day,” he said, and folded the seven of spades. Then he got to his feet and crossed his living room to look out the glass doors and beyond the wooden-railed terrace to the golf course. Thirteenth tee. Makes sense.

It hadn’t been Ray’s day for quite a while, all things considered. First the cock-ups in building the theater on the Strip, then the breach-of-contract suit from those bastards in Nashville, then the IRS, and now this murder trial. Some parlay.

Ray still wasn’t sure it was right to let his songs play on the radio during the trial; seemed disrespectful somehow. Seemed as if he wasn’t taking that poor bitch’s death seriously. But every one of his advisers — and Ray Jones, it seemed to Ray Jones, had more advisers than a horse has flies — every last one of them had told him to let the songs play on, trial be damned. Each one for his own separate reasons.