Part 26 (1/2)

The mix - such as it was - ended a week later. Tell asked Jannings for a recommendation and a tape.

'Okay, but you know you're not supposed to play the tape for anyone until the alb.u.m comes out,' Jannings said.

'I know.'

'And why you'd ever want to, for anyone, is beyond me. These guys make The b.u.t.thole Surfers sound like The Beatles.'

'Come on, Paul, it wasn't that bad. And even if it was, it's over.'

He smiled. 'Yeah. There's that. And if I ever work in this business again, I'll give you a call.'

'That would be great.'

They shook hands. Tell left the building which had once been known as Music City, and the thought of the sneakers under the door of stall number one in the third-floor men's John never crossed his mind.

Jannings, who had been in the business twenty-five years, had once told him that when it came to mixing bop (he never called it rock and roll, only bop), you were either s.h.i.+t or Superman. For the two months following the Beats' mixing session, John Tell was s.h.i.+t. He didn't work. He began to get nervous about the rent. Twice he almost called Jannings, but something in him thought that would be a mistake.

Then the music mixer on a film called Karate Masters of Ma.s.sacre died of a ma.s.sive coronary and Tell got six weeks' work at the Brill Building (which had been known as Tin Pan Alley back in the heyday of Broadway and the Big Band sound), finis.h.i.+ng the mix. It was library stuff in the public domain - and a few plinking sitars - for the most part, but it paid the rent. And following his last day on the show, Tell had no more than walked into his apartment before the phone rang. It was Paul Jannings, asking him if he had checked the Billboard pop chart lately. Tell said he hadn't.

'It came on at number seventy-nine.' Jannings managed to sound simultaneously disgusted, amused, and amazed. 'With a bullet.'

'What did?' But he knew as soon as the question was out of his mouth.

' ''Diving in the Dirt.'' '

It was the name of a cut on The Dead Beats' forthcoming Beat It 'Til It's Dead alb.u.m, the only cut which had seemed to Tell and Jannings remotely like single material.

's.h.i.+t!'

'Indeed it is, but I have a crazy idea it's gonna go top ten. Have you seen the video?'

'No.'

'What a scream. It's mostly Ginger, the chick in the group, playing mud-honey in some generic bayou with a guy who looks like Donald Trump in overalls. It sends what my intellectual friends like to call 'mixed cultural messages'.' And Jannings laughed so hard Tell had to hold the phone away from his ear.

When Jannings had himself under control again, he said, 'Anyway, it probably means the alb.u.m'll go top ten, too. A platinum-plated dog-t.u.r.d is still a dog-t.u.r.d, but a platinum reference is platinum all the way through - you understand dis t'ing, Bwana?'

'Indeed I do,' Tell said, pulling open his desk drawer to make sure his Dead Beats ca.s.sette, unplayed since Jannings had given it to him on the last day of the mix, was still there.

'So what are you doing?' Jannings asked him.

'Looking for a job.'

'You want to work with me again? I'm doing Roger Daltrey's new alb.u.m. Starts in two weeks.'

'Christ, yes!'

The money would be good, but it was more than that; following The Dead Beats and six weeks of Karate Masters of Ma.s.sacre, working with the ex-lead singer of The Who would be like coming into a warm place on a cold night. Whatever he might turn out to be like personally, the man could sing. And working with Jannings again would be good, too. 'Where?'

'Same old stand. Tabori at Music City.'

'I'm there.'

Roger Daltrey not only could sing, he turned out to be a tolerably nice guy in the bargain. Tell thought the next three or four weeks would be good ones. He had a job, he had a production credit on an alb.u.m that had popped onto the Billboard charts at number forty-one (and the single was up to number seventeen and still climbing), and he felt safe about the rent for the first time since he had come to New York from Pennsylvania four years ago.

It was June, trees were in full leaf, girls were wearing short skirts again, and the world seemed a fine place to be. Tell felt this way on his first day back at work for Paul Jannings until approximately 11.45 P.M. Then he walked into the third-floor bathroom, saw the same once-white sneakers under the door of stall one, and all his good feelings suddenly collapsed.

They are not the same. Can't be the same.

They were, though. That single empty eyelet was the clearest point of identification, but everything else about them was also the same. Exactly the same, and that included their positions. There was only one real difference that Tell could see: there were more dead flies around them now.

He went slowly into the third stall, 'his' stall, lowered his pants, and sat down. He wasn't surprised to find that the urge which had brought him here had entirely departed. He sat still for a little while just the same, however, listening for sounds. The rattle of a newspaper. The clearing of a throat. h.e.l.l, even a fart.

No sounds came.

That's because I'm in here alone, Tell thought. Except, that is, for the dead guy in the first stall.

The bathroom's outer door banged briskly open. Tell almost screamed. Someone hummed his way over to the urinals, and as water began to splash out there, an explanation occurred to Tell and he relaxed. It was so simple it was absurd . . . and undoubtedly correct. He glanced at his watch and saw it was 1:47.

A regular man is a happy man, his father used to say. Tell's dad had been a taciturn fellow, and that saying (along with Clean your hands before you clean your plate} had been one of his few aphorisms. If regularity really did mean happiness, then Tell supposed he was a happy man. His need to visit the bathroom came on at about the same time every day, and he supposed the same must be true of his pal Sneakers, who favored Stall #i just as Tell himself favored Stall #3.

If you needed to pa.s.s the stalls to get to the urinals, you would have seen that stall empty lots of times, or with different shoes under it. After all, what are the chances a body could stay undiscovered in a men's-room toilet-stall for . . .

He worked out in his mind the time he'd last been there.

. . . four months, give or take?

No chance at all was the answer to that one. He could believe the janitors weren't too fussy about cleaning the stalls - all those dead flies - but they would have to check on the toilet-paper supply every day or two, right? And even if you left those things out, dead people started to smell after awhile, right? G.o.d knew this wasn't the sweetest-smelling place on earth - and following a visit from the fat guy who worked down the hall at Ja.n.u.s Music it was almost uninhabitable - but surely the stink of a dead body would be a lot louder. A lot gaudier.

Gaudy? Gaudy? Jesus, what a word. And how would you know? You never smelted a decomposing body in your life.

True, but he was pretty sure he'd know what he was smelling if he did. Logic was logic and regularity was regularity and that was the end of it. The guy was probably a pencil-pusher from Ja.n.u.s or a writer for Snappy Kards, on the other side of the floor. For all John Tell knew, the guy was in there composing greeting-card verse right now: Roses are red and violets are blue, You thought I was dead but that wasn't true; I just deliver my mail at the same time as you!

That sucks, Tell thought, and uttered a wild little laugh. The fellow who had banged the door open, almost startling him into a scream, had progressed to the wash-basins. Now the splas.h.i.+ng-lathering sound of him was.h.i.+ng his hands stopped briefly. Tell could imagine the newcomer listening, wondering who was laughing behind one of the closed stall doors, wondering if it was a joke, a dirty picture, or if the man was just crazy. There were, after all, lots of crazy people in New York. You saw them all the time, talking to themselves and laughing for no appreciable reason . . . the way Tell had just now.

Tell tried to imagine Sneakers also listening and couldn't.

Suddenly he didn't feel like laughing any more.

Suddenly he just felt like getting out of there.

He didn't want the man at the basin to see him, though. The man would look at him. Just for a moment, but that would be enough to know what he was thinking. People who laughed behind closed toilet-stall doors were not to be trusted.

Click-clack of shoes on the old white hexagonal bathroom tiles, whooze of the door being opened, hisshh of it settling slowly back into place. You could bang it open but the pneumatic elbow-joint kept it from banging shut. That might upset the third-floor receptionist as he sat smoking Camels and reading the latest issue of Krrang!

G.o.d, it's so silent in here! Why doesn't the guy move? At least a little?