Basket Case (15 page)

"Twenty years ago, sport. Now it's Disneyland for lobsters." Burns is bracing himself upright on the cabin steps because he doesn't want to sit down again until I'm gone. He figures if he stands there long enough, I'll take the hint.

"Did you see Jimmy swimming around the wreck?"

"The plane's in pieces, man."

"Yes, Cleo told me. You didn't see Jimmy at all?"

Burns says, "We dove off the boat together. He went one way, I went the other."

"How was visibility?"

"Sucko. The wind blew twenty all night long so the bottom got churned to hell." Burns digs a beer from the refrigerator. From his body language it's obvious he's lost his patience, and possibly his temper.

For deterrence I take out my notebook, which Burns regards with a mixture of disgust and apprehension.

"Weird," I remark, as if to myself.

"What?" Burns strains to see what I'm writing.

"A twenty-knot wind all night long in August," I say. "Isn't that pretty unusual for the Bahamas?"

Jay Burns draws on his beer and shrugs.

"Yet it was glassy calm," I say, "the next day when you guys went out."

"That's the islands for ya."

"So the last time you saw Jimmy alive was right after you jumped in the water."

"The tail of the plane is, like, fifty yards from the nose section. Every now and then I could see bubbles but that was it. The bottom was all muddied up, like I tole you."

"Jay, what do you think happened down there?"

"Me?"

The telltale stall. Burns is trying to roust his brain and bear down. He's trying to avoid saying something that might contradict what he told the Bahamian authorities, or what Cleo told me. His fixed, furrowed expression is that of a drunk trying to wobble his way through a roadside sobriety test.

I nudge him along. "Jay, it's hard to understand. Jimmy was an experienced diver—"

"What're you tryin' to say? Anybody can swim off and get lost. It happens," he says. "The cops in Nassau, they said they see it all the time. He coulda used up his tank and had a heart attack on the way to the top. Who knows."

"I suppose. But it just seems weird."

Burns scowls. "You fuckin' people are all alike. Stirring up shit—Jesus, a man's dead. My best friend! Cleo's husband! He's dead and here you're tryin' to make some goddamn mystery out of it, just to sell papers."

I should inform Mr. Burns that the days are long gone when headlines sold significant numbers of newspapers; that the serious money comes from home subscriptions, not rack sales. I should tell him that most of the shrill tabloids have died off, and that the predominant tone of modern American journalism is strenuously tepid and deferential.

But I can't explain any of this to Jay Burns because he's suddenly seized me in a clinch and we're caroming from one side of the cabin to the other, literally rocking the boat. He outweighs me by at least fifty pounds, but luckily—being loaded to the gills—he is neither tireless nor exceptionally nimble. I still remember a few basic wrestling moves from high school and so, in two quick motions, I'm able to twist free and dump Jay Burns on his fat ass. Kicking out with both feet, he manages to nail me in the shins and I topple backward, snapping the door off the head.

Burns struggles to rise, making it all the way to one knee before I jump him. This time I drive an elbow into his nose and he stays down, slobbering blood like a gutshot boar. I sprawl on his chest, plant a knee in his groin and pin both arms over his head.

Lowering my face to his, I say: "Oh, Jay?"

"Huhhggnn."

"You hear me?"

Rage has fled from his eyes. All he wants now is to breathe without choking on viscous fluids.

"How old are you, Jay?"

"Wha-uh?"

"Simple question. How old?"

Burns sniffs to clear bubbles of blood from his nostrils. "Forty," he says thickly.

"That's awful young. Jay, I'm talking to you."

"Yeah, what?"

I point out that Kafka didn't make it to his forty-first birthday. Burns blinks quizzically. "Who's that?"

"Franz Kafka, a very important writer. Died before he got famous."

"What'd he write—songs?"

"No, Jay. Books and stories. He was an existentialist."

"I think you busted my fuckin' nose."

"Guess who else checked out on the big four-oh? Edgar Allan Poe."

"Him I heard of," Burns says.

"Raving like a cuckoo bird, he was. No one knows what happened there. When's your birthday?"

"October."

"It pains me, Jay, to think you've had more time on this planet than John Lennon. Does that seem right?"

"Lennon?" Finally Burns looks worried. "He was forty when that asshole shot him?"

"Yep," I say. "Same as you."

"How do you know all this stuff?"

"I wish I didn't, Jay, I swear to God. I wish I could flush it out of my skull. Did you kill Jimmy Stoma?"

"No!" His head lifts off the floor and his red-rimmed eyes go wide.

"Did Cleo do it?"

"No way," Burns says, but with less vehemence. He's giving me a look I've seen many times before. Orrin Van Gelder looked at me the same way during our first interview, when he was trying to figure out precisely how much I knew.

Jay Burns, stoned keyboardist, is wondering the same thing.

"Let me up," he says. Shortly he won't need my permission; he's rallying fast, shaking off the cobwebs.

"What was the name of this boat," I ask, "before Jimmy married Cleo?"

Burns, squirming in my grip, manages a chuckle. "Floating Hospice ,"he says.

"No kidding. That's odd."

"Odd how?" he says irritably. "Lemme up, goddammit."

"Odd that a guy who wanted to forget about the music business would name a boat after one of his albums."

"Man, you don't know what the fuck you're talkin' about. Who said Jimmy was turned off on the business?"

"His wife."

"Oh."

"And she would know, right? You said so yourself."

Before Jay Burns can buck me off, I get up. He allows me to help him to his feet, and reciprocates by retrieving my notebook from the cluttered floor. His ponytail has come undone and his oily pewter hair hangs crimped and lank. I hand him a business card listing my direct number at the Union-Register.

"What for?"

"In case you think of anything else you want to say about Jimmy."

"Doubtful," Burns says, though he pockets the card. "Sorry I went postal, man. It's been a shitty week."

"That's okay. I'm sorry about your nose."

"What a fucked-up way to get in Rolling Stone—the 'ex-Slut Puppy' who went on Jimmy Stoma's last scuba dive." Burns spits in the galley sink. "Ten years it's been since they even mentioned my name."

We go outside to the cockpit, stepping into a blessedly fresh breeze. On the dock a snow-white heron uncoils his neck in anticipation of a handout.

Burns says, "That's Steve. Jimmy named him after Tyler on account of his skinny legs."

"Tell me about Jimmy's solo project."

"How'd you—?" Then, scrambling: "Oh, the 'album.' It wasn't nowhere near finished—years and years he's been screwin' with that damn thing down in Exuma. He built a studio in the beach house but he never puts in more'n a couple hours. Not with all that pretty blue agua. Jimmy just about lives on this boat."

I ask Burns how many songs were finished.

"Not a one," he says. "It was just Jimmy by hisself, dickin' around with a Gibson."

"No session guys? No singers?"

"Nope. Just Jimmy, like I tole ya."

I'm always impressed that clods like Jay Burns, whipped and wasted, can somehow summon the energy to lie. It's as if they've got special reserve tanks of bullshit in the basement of their brains.

"Did he have a working title?" I ask.

"About fifty of 'em. It changed every week."

"And in the meantime, he was producing Cleo's new album?"

Burns starts to answer but changes his mind.

"What're you going to do now, Jay?"

"I dunno. She wants a piano on 'Shipwrecked Heart.' I told her I'd do it."

"That's not what I meant."

"Then you lost me again," he says.

"Get some rest, sport."

As I hop off the Rio Rio, the white heron squawks and flies from the dock. I hear Burns call after me: "Wait, man, I gotta ask you somethin'."

I turn around to see him leaning forward intently, knuckles planted on the gunwale. Lowering his voice, he says, "I was just wonderin', Billy Preston—you ever heard a him?"

"Sure. Played with the Beatles."

"One a my all-time heroes, man. Did he, you know… make it past forty?"

"Yeah, Billy's still alive and kicking."

"Far out. How 'bout Greg Allman?"

"Hangin' tough," I say, "and he's gotta be pushing fifty-five."

Jay Burns looks vastly relieved. "Thanks," he tells me. "I don't keep up with the news all that much."

13

The next morning I get up early and head for the newsroom, where I will gently steal a story from Evan, our intern.

I heard on the radio that the former mayor of Beckerville has passed away "after a long illness." The former mayor of Beckerville happened to be a petty slimeball named Dean Ryall Cheatworth, who was caught accepting sexual favors in exchange for corrupt activities; to wit, initiating zoning variances to accommodate certain adult-oriented establishments. As mayor of Beckerville, Dean Cheatworth once sold his tie-breaking vote for a two-minute hand job, which ultimately resulted in the grand opening of a nude hot-oil massage parlor next door to a children's day care center. The former mayor of Beckerville would have spent much longer than three weeks in prison had he not been diagnosed with terminal cancer and released on a sympathy parole.

I'm determined that Dean Cheatworth's obituary shall not minimize or overlook his misdeeds, as happens too often at the Union-Register. Emma thinks it's callous to provide a full and frank accounting of a dead scoundrel's life. She says it's disrespectful to the grieving kin. I suspect if Emma had been running the show, Richard Nixon's obit would have dealt with Watergate parenthetically, if at all.

Evan doesn't seem upset that I'm poaching the story. "All right, Jack," he says amiably, "but you owe me one." Evan is gangly and cyanotic and fashionably disheveled. He has no intention of becoming a professional journalist after finishing college, but nonetheless I'm fond of him.

"Mr. Cheatworth is one of those thieving schmucks who deserves to be drop-kicked into his grave," I feel bound to explain. "Better for me to do it than you. Emma's likely to make a stink."

Evan nods, saying, "Man, you and Emma!"

Over beers he once predicted she and I would become lovers, based on the "smoldering" intensity of our newsroom arguments. It was such a ludicrous comment that I couldn't bring myself to insult the kid.

Today is different. "Wipe that frat-boy smirk off your face," I snap at him, "unless you want to spend the rest of the summer writing for the Wedding page."

Evan mumbles a bemused apology and slips away. Logging on to the morgue, I retrieve and print out the most comprehensive, unsparing stories about the onetime political kingpin of Beckerville.

After making a few quick phone calls, I begin to write:

Dean R. Cheatworth, the longtime Beckerville mayor driven from office by a sex-and-corruption scandal, passed away Thursday after a two-year battle with cancer. He was 61.

"I don't care what they say, he was good for this town," said Millicent Buchholz, Cheatworth's executive secretary for most of his 14 years at city hall. "Dean made some dumb-ass moves and he paid for them. But we shouldn't forget the decent, honest things he did along the way."

Cheatworth, who served as mayor from 1984 to 1998, is credited with bringing the first food court to the Beckerville Outlet Mall and expanding the town's bicycle-path system by almost three miles.

But two years ago, Cheatworth was convicted of trading his vote on the zoning board for private sessions with prostitutes employed by Miami massage-parlor mogul Victor Rubella. Rubella and three women pleaded guilty in the case, and all testified against Cheatworth at trial.

The jury took only nineteen minutes to convict the mayor, who was suspended from office and slapped with a six-year sentence. He was released early when prison doctors discovered a malignant tumor in his right lung.

Councilman Franklin Potts said Cheatworth felt "real crummy" about bringing disgrace upon the city. "Just last weekend he said, 'Frankie, I know I did wrong, and now it's between me and my Savior.'"

The former mayor had told friends he "found the Lord" during his 22 days behind bars…

Off we go. I knock out fourteen inches by the time Emma emerges from the midmorning editors' meeting. I expect a fuss but she seems distracted. After skimming the story, all she says is: "Let's lose the tumor, Jack. Say they found an 'abnormality' in his lungs."